Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
You’re a project manager. You have too much work to fit into a project (scope) and not enough time to do it. What do you do? Timebox. Timeboxing is a technique to fit what you can accomplish (some of the scope) into the time you have allotted. Timeboxing works when you have fixed schedule …
In response to my most recent Pragmatic Manager (about shortening project startup times), a colleague wrote: “I am working on a lifecycle definition team in my department and finally convinced the team that Agile Development was a Methodology using an Iterative Model lifecycle.” My colleague has neatly described the methdology (the practices) and the …
I spoke at a joint meeting of the RI PMI and ASQ last night. My presentation was “Predicting Project Completion.” I offered a simulation for people to try: predicting the time it would take and then sorting two decks of cards. We learned a lot and had fun. At the end of the meeting, one …
I’ve been thinking more about requirements. In the most recent two assessments I’ve done, both organizations have been stuck on thinking they could define their requirements before design and implementation. IWBNI (It Would Be Nice If) users could know their requirements early. For small projects (a couple of people, maybe a couple of months) …
Continue reading “Users Can't Know Their Requirements Early”
Last night at my SPIN talk someone came up to me at the end of the talk. I’d discussed earned value and inch-pebbles in my talk but hadn’t specifically discussed how to avoid the dreaded “percent complete” reporting problem to management. The percent complete problem occurs when you have to report progress to management as …
Continue reading “Showing Project Progress (NOT percent complete)”
On the face of it, higher productivity looks like a Good Thing. More products for less time. Who wouldn’t want this? But I wonder about this search for higher productivity. What do managers really want? If you want to understand about productivity for software organizations, read Putnam and Myers’ new book, Five Core Metrics: …
Continue reading “The Never-Ending Search for Higher Productivity”
I’m at the 13ICSQ conference this week. One person (at least) was confused about agile processes: Conference attendee: “Agile processes are a license to hack!!!!!!!” JR: “No. Every agile team I’ve seen is highly disciplined. No hacking there. I’m sure there are people who say they’re performing agile development, and they’re just hacking, but …
Continue reading “Agile Techniques are Discipline from Within the Team, not Control from the PM”
Release trains, the technique of planning releases on a particular date several times a year (such as quarterly releases, on the 12th of the last month of the quarter), can help you manage your development and test staff as well as machines and tool resources. I wrote about release trains a while ago here. …
At a recent presentation about agile project management, I mentioned refactoring. One of the attendees said, “No, I don’t want to redesign the whole application every iteration. Agile’s not for me!” Well, I decided I couldn’t address the resistance if I didn’t first start with defining refactoring. I said, “Hmm, refactoring isn’t the same …
In the past few weeks, too many managers have written to me, asking for help on knowing how “good” their people are. When I ask more questions, such as “What does good mean to you?”, they say they want to know who’s most productive. Then I walk through this analysis with them: Productivity is …
Continue reading “Measuring Productivity #1: Defining Productivity”