by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, October 17, 2001. Too many projects? Not sure which projects are most important? Welcome to project portfolio management. A client, Tim, is having trouble with his portfolio management. Senior management is organizing next year’s budget and hiring plan. They want more projects in the […]
© 2001 Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Cutter IT Journal, October 2001. Suppose you are a manager in a software development organization that isn’t achieving the financial results that senior management wants. The good news is that your management understands that one way to reduce costs is to increase effectiveness of
© 2001 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in STQE, September/October 2001 issue, as the Last Word column. One of my colleagues recently took a job as a software quality assurance manager at a commercial software company. Jill had always been determined to improve the product development process wherever she’d worked, and seeing “process
by Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Software Development, September 2001. We all have problems at work, sometimes more than we can easily handle. Managers tend to encounter more sticky situations because of the nature of our job. And not only do we have our own problems—others often ask us to solve theirs, as
© 2001 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in STQE, Volume 2, Number 5, September/October 2001. “Test is always at the end of the schedule. We never test for as long as we need to. We get whipped around by whatever the developers do. It just isn’t fair.” “We don’t have enough testers.” “My management
© 2001 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Cutter IT Journal, June 2001. Software organizations take forever to hire technical people, we overwork them, our projects are late, we can’t get everything done. We must have a people shortage, yes? No. True, we have plenty of problems, but we have enough people to
Introduction Any project where people bring different assumptions about working norms (either in product development or team behavior) is a multicultural project. Even when all project participants are from one country, the project manager (PM) may still have to deal with multiple cultures and those cultures’ expectations and behaviors. Some of the team differences are
by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s e-Project Advisor, February 8, 2001. Gotta release it now? Gotta put in just that one more feature? Gotta do something else? The more gottas you have, the less agile your project is. E-project management is about the ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions. So, how can you
by Karl E. Wiegers, (Process Impact) and Johanna Rothman. [This paper was originally published in Software Development, February 2001. It is reprinted (with modifications) with permission from Software Development magazine.] Pat, a vice-president in an Internet start-up company, was proud of her team’s previous product release but concerned about why it had shipped a few weeks
“No Fred, we’re not considering you for that promotion. You’re too valuable where you are.” How many of us have heard those words, or said them at least once to our staff? Sometimes, we use the “too valuable” phrase to avoid discussing problems with a staff member, problems you can bring out in the open