Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Dave, the tech lead, was trying to use an agile approach with his team. Four of the people worked together in a team room in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Two people worked from their homes in New Hampshire, and one person, the product owner, worked from her home in Indiana. Their agile approach wasn’t …
Continue reading “Distributed Team Workspaces Start With Hours of Overlap”
Summary: Too often, customers have a “fake certainty” about the problems they want to solve. They might not have defined the real problem, but they have frequently defined the solution anyway. The risk is that we might build the wrong thing. When the product owner works with the customers to define the problem, then works …
Continue reading “Eliminate Fake Certainty and Solve the Real Problem”
Summary: Many managers and distributed team members think that if they just had the right tools, they could make some agile approach work. Maybe, but tools only enhance the work of a collaborative agile team. Before you select tools, make sure you have people who can work together and have enough skills and capabilities for …
Continue reading “For Distributed Agile Teams, It’s Not All about the Tools”
In our previous article, we discussed the importance of sufficient hours of overlap in managing a team’s workspace. As a reminder, here are the four components we see that need to be managed in a distributed team workspace. Sufficient hours of overlap in everyone’s workday. Sufficient communications technology that supports everyone equally in synchronous and …
Continue reading “Distributed Teams Need Sufficient Communications Technology”
Cliff, an IT Director was concerned. One of the projects was a mess. It didn’t seem to matter how much or how little the team had for requirements. The team never seemed to release enough on time. Cliff had only been with the organization for four weeks. Yet, that team seemed to have more trouble …
Impediments will occur on any project; agile projects are no exception to risks. Agile succeeds because you are more likely to see the problem before it becomes a disaster. Two developers got the flu. Your tester has jury duty. The team can’t figure out what the design should be for a specific feature and it’s …
Continue reading “Three Tips for Removing Impediments the Agile Way”
If you’re the project manager for a geographically distributed team, you have likely encountered time zone challenges in running your meetings: 7 a.m. New York time is 8 p.m. in Singapore. Meetings at these times can exhaust everyone. Here’s a common scenario faced by managers of distributed teams: “We’ll have our next standup tomorrow, same …
Continue reading “Agile Alternatives for a Geographically Distributed Team”
For me, writing has four main parts: researching or deciding what to write and organizing it, writing, editing, and publishing. You might think of these steps as analysis and design, coding, testing, and release. I like to keep my writing chunks small so that my editing occurs soon after my writing. Small chunks also means …
I’ve lost count of the number of companies that don’t pay for training—or even provide tuition reimbursement. I also see too many organizations decide whom to hire based on technical skills. They don’t see the irony here. That means you’re responsible for your ongoing career development. And here’s the kicker: The more you learn and …
In more traditional projects, the Project Management Institute has a notion that you can “control” a project. I have never found that to be true. Of course, I never quite used a waterfall approach–I have used feature-driven approaches more often than I used a serial approach. But the idea that I could somehow control a …