Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I spoke at Agile 2019 last week. I had both a great time and a heart-rending realization. The great time was meeting and reconnecting with people. The heart-rending realization is our industry is in big, big trouble. Here are my thoughts and where I think the “agile” industry is headed. Problems I See with “Agile” …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 1: Do You Need an Agile Approach?”
Early on in my agile practice, I believed in generalizing specialists. I even wrote Five Tips to Hiring a Generalizing Specialist. However, if a team becomes collaborative, I no longer think we need generalizing specialists. That’s because the team works and learns as a team. If a team is willing to collaborate as pairs, a …
Continue reading “Rethinking the Need for Generalizing Specialists”
Part 1 was about seeing the value in the various projects. I called the value stream a product so that people would think about who would use it and why. I suggested that we stop work on specific products when you have more products than teams. That would allow you to work on other projects …
Continue reading “Projects, Products, and the Project Portfolio: Part 2, Assess & Rank the Work”
Note: I had a technical problem with my site and lost this post, even though I had published it. This is the restoration. If you subscribe to my feed, you might see this twice. I’ve been working with some clients who are trying to find the magic way to slice and dice their project portfolios. …
Continue reading “Projects, Products, and the Project Portfolio: Part 1, Organize the Work”
After Mark Kilby and I collaborated on From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, we decided to start creating online classes. We have just opened registration for our first geographically distributed agile teams class. See Prepare for Successful Distributed Agile Teams. It’s a self-study class. That means you can proceed at your own pace. You’ll …
Continue reading “Announcement: New Distributed Agile Teams Online Workshop”
I’ve led various project kickoffs over the years. Back in the closer-to-waterfall days, we had to introduce ourselves to each other. We could then move to the project purpose and release criteria. Now that agile teams stay together, we can change the kickoff to more project-specific work. I wrote an article several years ago, Keys …
A colleague asked me about the kinds of documentation the team might need for their stories. He wanted to know what a large geographically distributed team might do. What was reasonable for the stories, the epics, and the roadmap? How little could they do for requirements documentation? I start with the pattern of Card, Conversation, …
Continue reading “Minimum Requirements Documentation: A Matter of Context”
When Esther and I wrote Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management, we didn’t really think one-on-ones were a secret. But, managers weren’t conducting the one-on-ones regularly. The managers canceled for other “higher priority” meetings. The first modern management book is about how managers manage themselves. Part of that management is how and when they …
I’ve been working at the intersection of the project portfolio and the product roadmaps. (You can tell because of the various posts about information persistence.) Here’s what I find when I work with my clients: They have years worth of projects in the project portfolio. They have years worth of ideas in various states of description in …
I’m in the midst of collecting the management myths into three books. The series is currently titled “Make Modern Management Easy”. The first book is Practical Ways to Manage Yourself. I was thinking of starting with managing the organization issues. The way organization attempt to “manage performance” and do/do not manage the project portfolio has …
Continue reading “First of Three Modern Management Books Available”