If you are anything like me, you have a to-do list a mile long. Because I work for myself, I have an integrated list of everything I need to do: projects for clients, books to write, articles to write, columns to write, presents to buy, house maintenance, clothes to organize, office cleanup. The list is […]
Summary: While managing a long project, it’s easy to lose track of progress. And, when that happens, how do you even know whether you’re still making progress? In this article, Johanna Rothman offers suggestions to help you take your project one step at a time and keep it under control. When I coach managers or
Summary: Keeping your team busy with work all of the time may seem good for productivity and a good use of your work force. But it comes with serious backlash in the form of delayed work, incomplete iterations, technical debt, and the negative consequences of multitask context switching. In this column, Johanna Rothman explains how
Some agile teams build and maintain their project’s rhythm, happily developing the system. Sure, they may encounter issues–but they can manage those problems and they successfully release the product. No one works overtime, the product owner is happy and the users are happy with the system. Then there are the other teams. I meet many
Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams? That’s because you were working
I originally wanted to write about how to start an agile project, possibly the pilot agile project in your organization—if it was starved of resources, people, machines, space, whatever. But I can’t write that article because no advice is worth the space. You shouldn’t even start that project. An important tenet of agile project management
If you’ve started to use agile approaches to your projects, you’ve reaped the benefits of seeing completed work, reduced work in progress, and making project risks more transparent earlier. But there’s another benefit of moving to delivering work in smaller chunks: incremental funding for projects. Few organizations have embraced the idea of incremental funding. It’s
“Hey, Dan, it’s time for us to move to agile,” explained Tristan, a project manager. “Tristan, you’ve been singing that tune for a while,” replied Dan, a member of the PMO. “Well, now I have data that I think you can use with the rest of the PMO and with our senior managers. Look at
Project portfolio management is how we choose the strategically important work—the work that provides the most business value to the organization now. There are two pieces to project portfolio management then: how to choose the work, and for how long. Many organizations struggle to use ROI (Return on Investment). You can try to use ROI.
Linda manages a large program LargeEngCo calls “Sales Order Support,” SOS. The SOS program contains four projects. The goal is to provide to the salespeople in the field the list of what products this customer had previously ordered, and what was now available as add-ons for those products. Linda has asked Paul, her CIO, when