Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Whenever I teach agile approaches, I discuss the possible meetings a team might choose. Some people turn to me in dismay. They start adding up all the meeting time and say, “That’s a lot of meetings.” Could be. Especially if you use iterations. You might have these meetings: A retrospective once every two weeks. A …
Consultants and writers share a common problem: we are business owners. That means we manage our businesses. Yes, I manage my own product development and my business. The great Joanna Penn interviewed me and the podcast is now live: Strategy And Business Plans For Authors With Johanna Rothman. If you write and self-publish, you should listen …
Continue reading “Podcast about the Business of Writing and Consulting”
As I work with people to use agile approaches, I see many organizational constraints. I’ve been trying to find a visualization for what I see. I don’t know if I’ve got it yet, but here is my sum-of-the-parts image. The organization’s culture drives decisions (or not!) about the strategy. Strategy, with any luck, creates clarity …
Agile approaches can help a team release more often. When a team releases more often, the product people can replan the product roadmaps. The project portfolio people can replan the project portfolio. Not every team releases often enough to take advantage of replanning small and often. Everyone falls prey to “too much” thinking. The product …
Continue reading “Frequent Releasing Can Lead to Short and Frequent Planning”
I spoke with an aspiring coach earlier this week. He asked me if people I ever coached were “resistant.” I don’t label people as “resistant.” If I need to label them, I think about this term, “People with data I should hear.” I like to think about what people resist, especially people in technical organizations. …
Continue reading “Resisting Change or Resisting a Pushed Solution”
Most managers I meet want to do a good job. They want to provide the vision for the people doing the work. They want to provide coaching if people need it. They want to know that people can deliver the outcomes the organization needs and the managers want. As their organizations move to agile approaches, …
Continue reading “Apply “How Little” Thinking to Agile Management Control”
Mark Kilby and I are almost done with the chapter on geographically dispersed teams with no (or very few) hours of overlap in our book about distributed agile teams. We are looking for any example of a team—agile or not—who successfully used/is using Follow the Sun. Follow the Sun is a great idea. The idea is …
Continue reading “Looking for Stories of Success with Follow-the-Sun”
One of the problems I see in projects and organizations is when people wish for certainty. Too many agile project managers and Scrum Masters want a known velocity. They don’t realize that velocity is a relative capacity measurement, not a guarantee. Product managers, the people who manage the project portfolio, all seem to want certainty …
Sometimes, teams have trouble releasing their work, showing the value of the work they’ve completed. There are many possible reasons for this release problem: The team doesn’t have sufficient working agreements about what “done” means. I’ve written about frictionless releasing. In Create Your Successful Agile Project, I wrote about the done, done-done, and done-done-done words we …
We, as people who create products, often have big, audacious ideas. That’s great. The problem is this: How can you make minimum, bite-size stories that the team can deliver on a frequent basis? You might need these minimums: A minimum marketable feature A minimum viable product A minimum viable experiment All of these minimums are …