This is Johanna Rothman’s May 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Have you noticed that some teams seem to be more effective than others? Most of the time, they manage their WIP (Work in Progress). They learn together. Often, they collaborate across the organization. But the big […]
Susan, a new-to-the-company program manager, could not understand why Product A was so late. The teams used a well-known agile approach. They weren’t working on anything else except for production support. Yet, even though the teams worked hard, not one team could meet any of their deadlines. The teams were unhappy with their progress. They
Back when I wrote Writing Secret 5: Decide on One Ideal Reader, I suggested there was one primary reader and other secondary readers. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Nonfiction writing causes people to decide, rethink, or change their actions, all a change of some sort. That means the ideal reader for a given piece
Several people on social media have denigrated the terms “project manager” and “program manager.” These people claim there is no need for either role in an effective team, especially an agile team because the team can manage its own deliverables. While some agile teams can manage their own deliverables, that’s not the only role for
The larger your product, the more likely you have components teams. I often see component teams because of the architecture of the product. In this first image, the Integrated System Program, the rest of the product uses the Platform of Common Services as components. Also, the teams find it tempting to think of the common
Continuing the series on dependencies… Maybe you don’t have the problem where the team creates internal dependencies with their process. And you don’t have to wait for someone outside the team to approve your work—an organizational process. But you do have a combination of platform/component teams and feature teams. I see this most often in
Did you ever work on a project that dragged on and on, slipping a week every week? Back in the day, we called those projects “death marches.” I never saw anyone literally die, but I saw too many divorces, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and very dissatisfied and unhappy employees and customers. Waterfall projects can
Many people talk about “going back to normal.” We aren’t going to return to normal. That old normal is gone, at least for a year, if not longer. (I suspect we will cycle between remote work and office work for the foreseeable future.) What we can do is discover a new normal. Discovery requires different
Many of my clients feel stuck with their component teams. They feel they must implement across the architecture, not through it. That’s because the people are organized in component teams. As the organization grows, so does the number of component teams. The more component teams they have, the more complexity they create in the teams, in
At the Influential Agile Leader workshop earlier this year, I led a session about scaling and how you might think about it. I introduced the topic and explained that “scaling” might not be the answer. My experience is that when people use frameworks for larger efforts, they experience these unexpected side effects: The framework actions