Simone, a French project manager, emailed me. “Johanna, we are having trouble getting the people together. These people worked together before on the previous release. But on this release, they are not working together. I’ve done these things,” and she listed a number of smart ideas. I replied by email, “Where’s the project charter with […]
Please join Shane Hastie and me for a webinar about our Geographically Distributed Teams workshop on Feb 15, at noon Eastern. Want to make your geographically distributed agile projects more effective? Join Johanna Rothman and Shane Hastie for this webinar where they will discuss their workshop, Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams. We’ll
I hope that by now you see that you have any number of choices for your lifecycle if you are geographically distributed team and you are transitioning to agile. I do recommend a servant leader agile project manager, for coordination and risk management. With people all over the world, it’s difficult to coordinate the project,
Example 3: Using a Project Manager with Iterations and Kanban and Silo’d Teams Here, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations,
Vol 9, #3: Always Ask the Zeroth Question About Your Projects Jan 17, 2012, ISSN: 2164-1196 Sometimes, you wonder why you are doing this project. You spend all this time on it, you’re sure there isn’t much value from the project, and still, the project is on the top of your manager’s list. There’s
I was talking with a client recently, who was professing his desire for younger candidates. “Can anyone older than 35 or 40 really know anything?” was his concern. I sat there, a little nonplussed. “How old do you think I am?” I paused. “No, don’t answer that. Just remember that age is not the issue.
How many times have you seen this in your projects: You need something specific done such as a new database, or a specific user interface designed, or you need a release engineer, or a user interface designer, or a part of the system tested and the normal person who does that work is not available?
A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons: The project manager and product owner start the release planning and ask the team if the release planning is ok. The team does not generate the initial draft of release planning
Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California. This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were
I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile. Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all