Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Does your team have to keep two sets of “books”? You have an agile roadmap to see where you’re headed. You have a smallish backlog of the near/upcoming work. You’re delivering on a frequent basis. And, someone on your team keeps a Gantt chart because a manager wants to see the team’s progress in a …
Continue reading “What Decision Will You Make Based on This Data?”
It’s time to wrap this series. I started asking if you actually need an agile approach in Part 1 and noted the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers in an agile transformation. Part 3 was about how people want a recipe. Part 4 was about how “Agile” is meaningless …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 5: Summary”
I started this series asking where “Agile” was headed. (I didn’t like what I saw at the Agile 2019 conference.) Part 1 was about the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers. Part 3 was about how people want a recipe. This part is about what “Agile” or “agile” means. …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 4: What Does “Agile” Mean?”
I started this series asking where “Agile” was headed. Part 1 was about the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers. This part is about how people want a recipe, The Answer, for how to get better at “Agile.” Before we can address what an answer might be, your need …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 3: What Is The Recipe, The Right Answer?”
In Part 1, I wrote about how “Agile” is not a silver bullet and is not right for every team and every product. This post is about how management fits into agile approaches. Too often, managers think “agile” is for others, specifically teams of people. Teams need to figure out how to manage their WIP, …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 2: Where Does Management Fit?”
Early on in my agile practice, I believed in generalizing specialists. I even wrote Five Tips to Hiring a Generalizing Specialist. However, if a team becomes collaborative, I no longer think we need generalizing specialists. That’s because the team works and learns as a team. If a team is willing to collaborate as pairs, a …
Continue reading “Rethinking the Need for Generalizing Specialists”
Part 1 was about seeing the value in the various projects. I called the value stream a product so that people would think about who would use it and why. I suggested that we stop work on specific products when you have more products than teams. That would allow you to work on other projects …
Continue reading “Projects, Products, and the Project Portfolio: Part 2, Assess & Rank the Work”
A colleague asked me about the kinds of documentation the team might need for their stories. He wanted to know what a large geographically distributed team might do. What was reasonable for the stories, the epics, and the roadmap? How little could they do for requirements documentation? I start with the pattern of Card, Conversation, …
Continue reading “Minimum Requirements Documentation: A Matter of Context”
I’ve been working at the intersection of the project portfolio and the product roadmaps. (You can tell because of the various posts about information persistence.) Here’s what I find when I work with my clients: They have years worth of projects in the project portfolio. They have years worth of ideas in various states of description 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 …