I delivered a keynote about influence and authority last week at Better Software/Agile Development Practices. I have also uploaded them to slideshare. For those of you who were not at the conference, I told a story about transitioning to agile as a running story throughout the keynote. I hope the slides stand alone. Maybe they […]
I have finally posted my most recent email newsletter, Three Myths and Three Tips. It took a while because I was converting my site to WordPress and I did not want to maintain the site in two places. I have finally transitioned fully to WordPress. What a relief. All my old articles are finally posted.
In my post, When You Have No Product Owner at All, I said That’s because agile needs a responsible person who is not part of the cross-functional technical team to rank the backlog so the team knows the order of the work. Without that person, the team does not know what to do. I’ve had
What happens when you have no product owner at all? How does a team know what features to develop in what order? Several teams I know encountered this. They all had product managers. Most of them had Business Analysts. All of them had a technical manager who was willing to be their product owner, but
I did decide to talk about how we got started on 100% utilization and what to do about it. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say, so here is what I wish I’d said: How 100% Utilization Got Started Back in the early days of computing, machines were orders of magnitude more expensive than
It’s been a tough week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. We’ve had a bunch of family illnesses — nothing deadly, but difficult to diagnose with long term effects. A very old friend of the family died. And because it’s June, the kids have a gazillion things with school and sports. I’m not quite back
If you’re managing a project longer than a few weeks, you may realize that the project’s progress is not quite where you think it should be. It can seem impossible to change course. But choosing to continue what you’re doing is a choice. So you can choose to do something different. I started thinking
A reader sent me email with this question: “We have a group of four people (3 developers and a tester). We work on 4 products, releasing one about once a month (each product is released once a quarter). The developers are devoted to one product when they’re developing, but have to fix problems immediately if
This past weekend, my husband insisted we clean up the basement, and go through a bunch of old boxes. I discovered performance evaluations, memos, status reports, and some project plans dating back from when I started working until I started my business. I discovered a major pattern about my approach to work: Since I’ve never
© 2002 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally publishedby Cutter, February 2002. You’ve decided that now is a good time to improve everyone’s skills with a little training. Maybe you’re planning some changes, or maybe you’re using training as a technique to avoid having to hire more people, and to help retain your best people.