Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Are you a manager accustomed to Management by Walking Around and Listening (MBWAL)? You can use MBWAL with collocated teams. MBWAL doesn’t work for distributed or dispersed teams. Remember, working remote is Not Business as Usual. (And won’t be for a while.) And, you might still have this question: “If no one’s in the office, …
Continue reading “Five Tips for Managers of Newly Dispersed Teams”
I’m conducting a Hudson Bay Start for a new offering: Advise, Influence, and Serve Clients for Mutual Profit: (Re)Start Your Consulting Practice. What do I mean? Several people have asked me for help in creating or sustaining their consulting practices. Since I’ve done that for 25 years, I know what works for me. I know …
Continue reading “Want to Work With Me to Start Your Consulting Practice?”
It’s time to wrap this series. I started asking if you actually need an agile approach in Part 1 and noted the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers in an agile transformation. Part 3 was about how people want a recipe. Part 4 was about how “Agile” is meaningless …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 5: Summary”
I started this series asking where “Agile” was headed. (I didn’t like what I saw at the Agile 2019 conference.) Part 1 was about the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers. Part 3 was about how people want a recipe. This part is about what “Agile” or “agile” means. …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 4: What Does “Agile” Mean?”
I started this series asking where “Agile” was headed. Part 1 was about the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers. This part is about how people want a recipe, The Answer, for how to get better at “Agile.” Before we can address what an answer might be, your need …
Continue reading “Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 3: What Is The Recipe, The Right Answer?”
Early on in my agile practice, I believed in generalizing specialists. I even wrote Five Tips to Hiring a Generalizing Specialist. However, if a team becomes collaborative, I no longer think we need generalizing specialists. That’s because the team works and learns as a team. If a team is willing to collaborate as pairs, a …
Continue reading “Rethinking the Need for Generalizing Specialists”
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”
Too many teams have overloaded Product Owners. The teams and PO have trouble connecting the organization’s strategy to what the teams deliver. The teams, PO, management, all think they need big planning. Too often, the POs don’t do small-enough replanning. They’re not living the principles of the agile manifesto. That insufficient collaboration means the PO …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 8: Summary: Collaborate at All Levels for the Product”
I started this series with the question: If we have teams for all other aspects of an agile approach, why wouldn’t we want the product owner to also work as part of a team? Could a team reduce the feedback loop durations? In Phase Gate or Other Serial Approaches… When projects use a phase gate …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 7: Collaboration Can Shorten Feedback Loops”