Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I’ve been pair-writing a book with Mark Kilby, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. We hit a big milestone today: We published the first complete draft today. We’ve been working on this book for a year. It’s much better because of our collaboration. We reflected a little on our success to …
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When I teach any sort of product/project/portfolio management, I ask, “Who believes multitasking works?” Always, at least several managers raise their hands. They believe multitasking works because they multitask all the time. Why? Because the managers have short work-time and long decision-wait time. If you are a manager, your time for any given decision looks …
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I have a new book in beta, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver. (The in beta part means that it is in copyediting, and then onto layout and print. It’s a process.) I’m so excited about this book. My three most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletters were about jelled teams: The Case For …
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We might start to think about agile approaches as a project change. However, if you want to “scale” agile, the entire culture changes. Here is a list of the series and how everything changes the organization’s culture: Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams. Without feature teams, I don’t see how you can …
Continue reading “Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 6: Creating the Agile Organization”
One of the challenges I see in organizations is how managers can use agile approaches. One of the biggest problems is that the entire organization is organized for resource efficiency (think silos of functional experts). Agile approaches use flow efficiency. Thinking in flow efficiency changes everything. Many people in organizations believe that dividing up the …
Continue reading “Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 5: Agile Management”
Note to my dear readers: As I write, I realize this series is growing. Thank you for your understanding in advance. In Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 4: Sharing Agile Outside of Product Development, I wrote about an independent workgroup with one stream of work. I used Customer Support as an example. Support has one stream: …
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Here’s where we are so far in this discussion of what it might mean to “scale” agile approaches: Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams (Teams that can produce features on a regular basis) Part 2: Programs of Cross-Functional Feature Teams (Programs (multiple teams working together) that deliver features on a regular basis) Part 3: Agile Product …
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In the “Scaling” Agile: Part 1, I wrote about cross-functional collaborative teams. The cross-functional collaborative feature team is the basis for “scaling” agile. In “Scaling” Agile, Part 2, I wrote about programs. I realized I need another part before my original part 3 :-). This new part 3 is about creating agile product development capabilities. …
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The first post was about scaling functions to working as collaborative agile teams. See Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Teams. Now, let’s talk about moving to multiple teams working together, a program. The good news is that you have a few cross-functional teams. They’ve been delivering as project teams. And, now you have a …
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I started this series writing about the need for coaches in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1. I continued in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 2, talking about the changed role of managers in agile. In this part, let me address the role of senior managers in agile and how coaches might help. For years, …
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