Project Managers with experience know that the traditional ways of doing PM are not sufficient any more for all our project situations. You need more tricks up your sleeve to pull it all off. That’s why I follow eagerly the techniques that are coming from the agile PM camp. But I have a hard time integrating them with my own views, at least in the ways they are expressed by practitioners. Glenn Alleman provided me with the final “aha” I needed in this direction in his posting : Agile PM is not discussing project management as such, but more the management of software development using agile processes (where the agile-part is in software development).
He raises some very interesting issues I agree with. Software development can be a part of a project, but a project always has a broader scope of activities, so limiting yourself to only development leaves out some aspects. And before we go this way, let me just start now 
: yes, it is important for a PM to know software development practices. Not to perform them personally, but to be able to communicate intelligent about the subject: “where are the risks, is he or she bullshitting me… ?”
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