Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I sent my newsletter, Scaling Agile and Lean to Programs to my subscribers yesterday. (Are you one of them? No? You should be!) If you are trying to use agile for several projects that together deliver value (a program), you might be wondering what the “right” approach is. You’ve heard of frameworks. Some of them …
Continue reading “Agile and Lean Program Management is Done”
As more teams and organizations transition to agile, they discover something important about leadership. Leadership is part of everything we do in an agile project. It doesn’t matter if it’s development or testing, management or architecture. We need people with high initiative and leadership capabilities. That leads me to these questions: We need project management. …
If you have an agile project larger than two or three feature teams, you have an agile program. A program is a collection of projects where the objective is one business deliverable. If you’ve managed programs before, you know how difficult it is to keep programs on track. With bigness comes more risk. One of …
Continue reading “Think Small: Five Tips for Agile Program Management”
One of the challenges in a program is how you manage the checkins, especially if you have continuous integration. I am quite fond of continuous integration, no matter how large your program is. I also like short iterations. (Remember Short is Beautiful?) But imagine a product where you have a platform and layers. I’m separating …
Continue reading “Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program”
My StickyMinds.com column, Do You Need Titled Architects for Your Programs? is up. Please do comment over there.
Lisa, Vin, and Derek in their comments on Agile, Architects, and Programs were concerned about how an architect might lead the test architecture work. They have good reason to be concerned. I hadn’t expressed how I see architecture working in an agile program, and they haven’t been to my talks, where I have discussed it. …
When I was on vacation, I realized that lots of people already know that we need development architects on complex programs. And, lots of people forget that we also need test architects on complex programs. The more complex the product, the more you need integrated testing, so the more agile makes sense for your product. …
Bob Payne interviewed me about agile program management last year at the Agile 2010 conference and posted the podcast. We always have a great time talking, and that podcast was no exception. He makes me sound quite coherent! Matt Heusser interviewed me about my new workshop with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock about Agile Architecture. My column on …
Continue reading “Musings about Agile Architecture and Agile Program Management”
I’ve been working with and discussing agile program management with a bunch of people. One of the big issues is: what do we call certain people at the program level? We need a program manager, someone who sets/explains the program’s vision, develops program-wide release criteria with sponsors, has a way to articulate program status, someone …
I’ve been working with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on an agile architecture workshop. I’m working with Rebecca because she has such a depth of experience in architecture, as well as design. She’s working with me because of my project and program management experience. We’re pretty psyched. We’re working through the issues of large programs and architecture, and, …
Continue reading “Develop by Feature, Develop by Component, or Some Combination?”