Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Note: I had a technical problem with my site and lost this post, even though I had published it. This is the restoration. If you subscribe to my feed, you might see this twice. I’ve been working with some clients who are trying to find the magic way to slice and dice their project portfolios. …
Continue reading “Projects, Products, and the Project Portfolio: Part 1, Organize the Work”
After Mark Kilby and I collaborated on From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, we decided to start creating online classes. We have just opened registration for our first geographically distributed agile teams class. See Prepare for Successful Distributed Agile Teams. It’s a self-study class. That means you can proceed at your own pace. You’ll …
Continue reading “Announcement: New Distributed Agile Teams Online Workshop”
I’ve led various project kickoffs over the years. Back in the closer-to-waterfall days, we had to introduce ourselves to each other. We could then move to the project purpose and release criteria. Now that agile teams stay together, we can change the kickoff to more project-specific work. I wrote an article several years ago, Keys …
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”
Dave, the tech lead, was trying to use an agile approach with his team. Four of the people worked together in a team room in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Two people worked from their homes in New Hampshire, and one person, the product owner, worked from her home in Indiana. Their agile approach wasn’t …
Continue reading “Distributed Team Workspaces Start With Hours of Overlap”
Summary: Too often, customers have a “fake certainty” about the problems they want to solve. They might not have defined the real problem, but they have frequently defined the solution anyway. The risk is that we might build the wrong thing. When the product owner works with the customers to define the problem, then works …
Continue reading “Eliminate Fake Certainty and Solve the Real Problem”
Summary: Many managers and distributed team members think that if they just had the right tools, they could make some agile approach work. Maybe, but tools only enhance the work of a collaborative agile team. Before you select tools, make sure you have people who can work together and have enough skills and capabilities for …
Continue reading “For Distributed Agile Teams, It’s Not All about the Tools”
I started this series discussing the issue of the various product-based roles in an agile organization. I suggested a product value team because one person becomes a bottleneck. One person is unlikely to shepherd the strategy and the tactics for a product. And, batching the product planning in one-quarter chunks doesn’t encourage us to reduce …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 6: Shorten Feedback Loops”
As I’ve written these product role posts, a number of you have asked about how to use component teams. You might have a security team. Maybe a performance team. Regardless of my desire, you have component teams. You want a more agile approach to manage the interdependencies among the teams. You want to be able …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 5: Component Teams to Create Slices”
Many people in the agile community promote a product orientation over a project orientation. That’s possible because an organization has product or feature teams. That works until you have more products than teams. That’s when you might still need projects to accomplish everything. If you keep teams together, you can still use projects in a …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 4: Product Orientation and the Role of Projects”