Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
While a pandemic might bring out the best and the worst of us, scams persist. I received an email this morning from a so-called “self-publishing” company. They are quite happy to help me get my book to traditional publishers. They didn’t say what it would cost, but they wanted the pdf of the interior and …
Continue reading “Beware of Scams for Writing and Otherwise”
All companies appear to be grappling with their approach to diversity and inclusion in the organization. Many have appointed Chief Diversity Officers. However, when you appoint a Chief Anything Officer, you decline responsibility for that thing yourself. I’ve seen this in Quality, Excellence, you name it. When you name a Chief <something> Officer, you no …
Continue reading “The Case Against Chief Diversity, Quality, Excellence Officers or Centers”
In a conversation about product quality, the product owner said, “If the testers found the problems faster, we would be done faster.” The tester said, “If the developers didn’t put so many problems in, we’d be done by now.” The developer said, “If you didn’t pressure me so much, I could have done a better …
Continue reading “Managers Make the Real Product Quality Decisions”
I encourage managers to delegate work. When managers insert themselves into the middle of the work, these problems occur: Managers slow the team down. Managers prevent people from learning. Managers don’t do their management work. That environment creates problems for everyone. Then I read Elisabeth Hendrickson’s Delegation is Overrated. I realized two things: Some managers …
Continue reading “Delegate Problems and Outcomes, Not Tasks”
We’ve all heard of big organizations where the top management said, “No need to ever be back in the office. Work from home, as long as you want.” And, the Wall Street Journal has this article, Business Travel Won’t Be Taking Off Soon Amid Coronavirus (you might need to subscribe to see the article). (I …
Every organization has policies of some sort. The smaller the organization, the fewer policies you might have. And, the larger the organization, the more policies you might think you need. I keep encountering policies that prevent people from delivering the outcomes the organization wants. Worse, the policies destroy trust. Why have policies anyway? We often …
Continue reading “How Well Do Your Policies Create Desired Outcomes and Trust?”
In the agile and lean communities, we talk a lot about transparency. This image is the transparency principle we used in From Chaos to Distributed Agile Teams. I see the most product and program success when the various teams create transparency between them, the middle of the continuum. That’s the full-product transparency. I see many …
I’ve seen several cases of process standardization recently. Those processes don’t translate to the current context. The processes don’t have sufficient agility to deliver the necessary results. Yet, people who want to use agile approaches don’t want to apply agile thinking to their processes. Some clients want to create their custom agile process— and then …
I had the chance to be on Andrei Crudu’s Techie Leadership podcast. He asks questions about successes and failures as a leader. When we’re on podcasts, it’s tempting for us to tell stories about other people. I do have plenty of stories about leaders in my consulting experience. And, I thought I should share some …
Several years ago, a client, Alex, asked me, “What’s wrong with this team? They don’t want to learn anything.” I was surprised. I asked him for more information. “Well, when I ask them to use TDD, they don’t want to even learn about it. When I ask them to use CI, they don’t want to. …
Continue reading “Team Improvement: Management Desires vs Team Reality”