Column About Transitioning to Agile in the Middle of a Project
My Stickyminds column, Transitioning to Agile in the Middle of a Project, is up. Enjoy!
MPD, Stickyminds columns
agile
MPD, personal, portfolio management
Starting and Finishing
I had coffee with a friend Saturday night. She said, “Our family has a tradition of starting many projects to see what we can stick with. If you don’t start a project, you can’t finish it.” She’s right. You certainly can’t finish something you don’t start. But the real question for all of is: Should
MPD
Bob Payne's Podcast Posted
Bob Payne interviewed me at Agile 2008. We spoke about my initial plans for Agile 2009, and my (in-writing) project portfolio book. The link is here: Agile 2009 – Johanna Rothman – Agile Portfolio Management and Agile 2009. I had a blast with Bob. If you’re wondering why it sounds like I’m chewing my cud
MPD, portfolio management
Intuition is Not Enough for Knowing About the Project Portfolio
I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kaplan’s book, Strategic IT Portfolio Management, as part of my research for my project portfolio book. He says something astounding (I’m paraphrasing a sentence on p.73): Managers intuitively know when their projects are not delivering sufficient value. Wow, that has not been my experience at all. My experience is that managers
MPD
Knowledge Management Needs to be Agile, Too
I was speaking with a potential client about their approach to knowledge management. They think they need a senior person to organize a top-down appoach, and build a custom tool, so they know what knowledge they want to manage and have a place to put it. I don’t think that’s going to work. That approach
MPD, portfolio management
Why Everyone Needs to Manage Their Own Project Portfolio
John Cook wrote a blog post, Scaling the number of projects, that starts addressing the issue of why it’s everyone’s job to manage their own project portfolios. Here’s an example of the problem he’s noticed: It sounds easy to manage independent projects: if the projects are for different clients and they have different developers, just
MPD, requirements
Traceability Matrix and Agile
I received two questions this week about how well does agile allow you to do traceability matrix. Very well is the short answer. Here’s why. If you commit to implementing features (not chunks of architecture) based on user stories in an iteration, you know what you’re planning before the iteration starts. Because you’re working in
MPD, Stickyminds columns
Does Exploratory Testing Have A Place On Agile Teams?
I have a Stickyminds column up, Does Exploratory Testing Have A Place On Agile Teams? The column arose out of an email conversation I had with Jon Bach. Please leave comments there.
lifecycle, MPD
Waterfall Projects Create Naivete
I’ve been working with several clients on their transitions to agile–or at least, more agile approaches to their projects. In each case, the managers decided to move towards agile because the technical staff were in their words, “naive” about the project goals. To be fair, none of the projects had a vision or release criteria,
Interview, MPD
Video Interview Posted at InfoQ
Deb Hartmann interviewed me (video and audio!) at Agile 2007. We mostly talked about schedule games from Manage It. (We briefly discussed Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management and Hiring the Best Knowedge Workers, Techies & Nerds.) For those of you who’ve met me and are wondering, “Where are Johanna’s glasses?” They’re in my