As I work with more organizations and across more cultures, I’ve been realizing that agile exposes a huge piece of the power in the organization that many people may not want exposed. I didn’t have a name for until I read Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. In it, he talks about Hofstede’s Power distance […]
I’m a pragmatic realist. So, in my program management workshop and in my geographically distributed teams workshop, and in a number of my other talks and workshops this year (and next year), I’m talking about influence. Of course, I’m addressing the issue of influence without authority. You never have enough authority to do the job
I’m seeing ads for what should be agile program managers on LinkedIn. I can’t tell what these positions really are, but when they say “responsible for management of 15 scrum teams,” that’s an agile software program manager to me. But the distressing part of the ad is when it’s a US-based position with a base
Agile and lean approaches, with either short timeboxes or explicit limiting work in progress and a focus on transparency works for many organizations. In the past few weeks, I’ve received a number of inquiries from all sizes of organizations asking the same kind of question, “How can we go all agile?” Experiment with an Agile
My Gantthead column, What’s an Agile PM to do? is up over at Gantthead.com. Please do leave comments over there.
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 8, #6: Plan Now for Your Next Time Out of the Office Sept 7, 2011 In This Issue: Plan Now for Your Next Time Out of the Office Johanna’s Speaking Calendar New to the Pragmatic Manager? Plan Now for Your Next Time Out of the Office I met with a
I’m giving at a talk at the Sept 19 Yahoo! Program Management Council, Managing for Collaboration. You might think this is a bit of an oxymoron: Managing for collaboration? But when you have programs, collections of projects where the business value is in the deliverable that the collection brings, you have to manage, influence, and
My StickyMinds.com column, Do You Need Titled Architects for Your Programs? is up. Please do comment over there.
In my post, When You Have No Product Owner at All, I said That’s because agile needs a responsible person who is not part of the cross-functional technical team to rank the backlog so the team knows the order of the work. Without that person, the team does not know what to do. I’ve had
What happens when you have no product owner at all? How does a team know what features to develop in what order? Several teams I know encountered this. They all had product managers. Most of them had Business Analysts. All of them had a technical manager who was willing to be their product owner, but