Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
What Happened to the Beautiful Plans? (They Became Experiments) Tim, a senior manager, loved seeing plans for work and roadmaps. Then, the organization decided to Embrace, Not Manage Change. Tim wasn’t sure how to track the work. This image helps me frame the need for an agile approach. (See the blog series: Where I Think “Agile” is …
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Create Your Agile Culture: Embrace, Not Manage Change Stu, a manager who’d been successful throughout the years by managing risks and managing change was concerned. “I don’t want to move fast and break things,” he said. “I don’t want to move too slowly. I’d like to move fast. But I don’t want to break anything.” …
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Lead Your Team’s Transparency and Pervasive Communication Kelly, a manager who served two geographically distributed teams, was concerned. Both teams worked on the Data and Reports module for the product. While the first team worked as fast as they could, the organization wanted features faster. Kelly had advocated for another team to join the first team. The organization assigned another …
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Manage “When” With a Parking Lot I’ve received several comments on the most recent Pragmatic Managers: Create Successful Schedules and Three Secrets to Creating Your Focus Time. Then, the writer asks, “What do I do when I have way too much to do?” Use a parking lot. Sometimes, I use a parking lot to kill …
Want a Successful Agile Transformation? Invite Managers Many people start their agile transformation with teams. That’s great, and it’s not enough to build and maintain an agile transformation—to change the culture. Too often, your agile approaches stall or create dysfunctions for the people and teams. If you want a successful agile transformation, invite the managers. …
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How Do You Tell Your Agile Story? An agile transformation is a change, a big cultural change. Agile approaches change us as individuals, our teams, and our organizations. That means we can tell stories and help other people see what we learned. We’ve been telling each other stories—around the campfire, across the table, from the …
Build Your Agile Tribe One of the reasons I use agile approaches is because they work. Not all of them, all the time. I find that I have to adapt my agile approach to the current context: the organization and its culture, the people, and the product(s) in development. Some people prefer to use a …
The Case Against Stable Teams, Part 2 In The Case for Stable Teams, Part 1 , I wrote about stable teams as a way to create jelled teams. My guideline was that the longer it took for people to be useful in the team, the more you needed a stable team. Otherwise, the cost of …
Own Your Leadership, Part 3 I started this story back in Own Your Leadership, Part 1: Dave and Sherry collaborated to facilitate their team’s ability to deliver one completed feature at a time, to improve the team’s throughput and quality. In Own Your Leadership, Part 2, Sherry realized the team doesn’t have a real PO, …
Own Your Leadership, Part 2 In Own Your Leadership Part 1: Dave and Sherry collaborated on seeing if the team could deliver one feature at a time, to improve the team’s throughput and quality. They had mixed success. The first story took them three full days, instead of their anticipated one day. All the other …