Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Three New Year’s Tips to Ease Your Team’s Agility I hope you are all having a terrific holiday season. A reader asked me about tips I had to ease her project’s transition from waterfall to an agile approach. Woo! I have plenty, so I decided to select three tips I have seen work. Tip 1: …
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Three Collaboration Secrets to Create Your Agile Culture I’ve been working with managers and technical leaders on a big problem: How to create an agile culture. The managers and leaders want to create a successful agile culture. The people on the teams—they often want to be “left alone” to do their work. That’s not horrible. …
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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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Hours of Overlap, the First Principle of Successful Distributed Teams Do you work in a building with other people? You might think you’re part of a collocated team. Here’s the test: Is everyone on the team within 30 meters (or seconds) of walking to each other? If so, yes, you are collocated. If not, no, …
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Reframe the “How Much” Conversation to “How Little” Dan, a product owner felt as if he was stuck between the proverbial rock and the hard place. His managers wanted “everything” in the next release.He knew the team couldn’t possibly deliver all of it. He hoped to get most of the features. He met with Polly, …
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Agile Transformation Secrets, Part 3: Principles Over Practices If you’re trying to use agile approaches or manage an agile transformation, consider these three mindsets for you, your project, and your organization: Manage for change (Part 1) Emphasize collaboration. (Part 2) Use principles, not practices, so teams can be autonomous and deliver what they need to …
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Agile Transformation Secrets, Part 2: Emphasize Collaboration If you’re trying to use agile approaches or manage an agile transformation, consider these three mindsets for you, your project, and your organization: Manage for change (Part 1) Emphasize collaboration. (this part) Use principles, not practices, so teams can be autonomous and deliver what they need to deliver. …
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Agile Transformation Secrets, Part 1: Manage for Change If you’re trying to use agile approaches or manage an agile transformation, consider these three mindsets for you, your project, and your organization: Manage for change (this installment). Emphasize collaboration. (I’ll send this in Part 2) Use principles, not practices, so teams can be autonomous and deliver …
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