What’s the difference between a delivery manager, a project manager and a scrum master

Roger on 01/12/2024

Delivery manager, project manager and scrum master are three quite distinct roles, but with a lot in common. Although each role is a valuable in it’s own right, for either of the roles to provide value, and for a person in a role to be successful, it’s important that the right role is selected for the circumstances. Exploring the commonalities and differences can help with matching the role to the working environment.

What the roles have in common

Delivery manager, project manager and scrum master are all non-authoritative. They don’t direct people or assign work. They exist to support teams to focus on the value-driving work by taking on the meta-work – the work that makes work possible – including things like planning, coaching and reporting. With so much overlap between the three, a Venn diagram helps us see some of the activities and responsibilities the roles take on.

What makes the roles unique

Delivery manager

Purpose: Enabling team health.

Responsibility: Creating an enabling environment by removing impediments, facilitation and coaching.

Method: Agnostic. Delivery management doesn’t follow any specific methodologies and can work equally well whatever methodology a team is using.

Best environment: Cross-functional teams tackling ambiguous problems.

Success measures: Individual’s purpose, autonomy and mastery.

Project manager

Purpose: Monitoring unplanned deviations.

Responsibility: Managing the day-to-day progress of a project to ensure it follows the plan.

Method: Predictive. Project methodologies (sometimes called waterfall) that involve upfront planning, reporting against the plan, and triggering corrective actions.

Best environment: Established project teams working on delivering known solutions.

Success measures: Project scope, schedule, budget.

Scrum master

Purpose: Improving team workflow.

Responsibility: Establishing Scrum and helping the team inspect and adapt their practice to become more effective.

Method: Adaptive, and Scrum specifically.

Best environment: Scrum team.

Success measures: Team velocity, throughput, sprint burndown.

Which role fits where

A delivery manager fits best as a part of a multi-disciplinary team tackling novel and ambiguous problems, where the organisational environment contains challenges for the team, and the team is open to being supported to tackling the challenges and removing impediments.

A project manager fits well in a team and organisation that is working on things that can be well-defined upfront, usually because they’ve been done many times before. Although project management has started to adopt adaptive methodologies, it still works best with pre-defined scope, budget and schedule.

A scrum master only works in a scrum team. That’s the only setting where a scrum master can be successful. Scrum master isn’t a profession in the same way delivery management and project management are, in that there is no career progression path of scrum master, senior scrum master, head of scrum mastery.