I think you will find that many organizations attempt to place the traditional project manager into the Scrum Master roll. I recently read a very good blog post by Uncle Bob that has me thinking that the project manager should not be the Scrum Master, but simply a team member.

The project manager has responsibilities that are sometimes in conflict with the roll of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is responsible for leading (not managing) through the iterative process, keeping the team on the path of its core values. The project manager on the other hand is responsible for ensuring a project is on time and on budget. If the project manager is the scrum master, I think he would be more likely to be biased towards schedules and budgets as opposed to the process. Anyone on a team under deadline/budget pressures can tell you that processed begin to devolve under time and budget pressures, “just get it done!” The pressures are sometimes at odds with the agile process itself.

I think that a project manager in a role of team member, whose deliverables are status and budget reports and who can have impedements from the team such as missed sprints, would provide an environment with less friction than a team being “run” by the project manager.

After all, a Scrum Team is ultimately answerable as a whole to the Business Owner, not the project manager.