When I started working on projects, we thought we could use a serial/waterfall approach to project management and product development. While we were wrong, one very good thing happened in the 1970s and 1980s: We took the time at the end of each phase to do a little retrospective. Yes, even for a serial approach, […]
This is the October 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Back in my August newsletter, Two Tips to Tease Apart Sneaky Problems and Make Progress, Axel, a project manager, and Barbara, part of the portfolio team, realized they had a sneaky problem of too
I’m excited to be part of TheAgileNetwork.com. That’s where people with significant expertise in agility gather to share their expertise. While frameworks and methods are useful for some people, my clients find them of limited value. My clients—and I bet many of you, my readers—need practical and pragmatic ideas rather than a specific agile framework
I keep seeing too much micromanagement in organizations. That’s where managers decide for the people they lead and serve, not with the people they lead and serve. Micromanagement creates several problems: People stop learning how to solve problems because the manager steps in to tell them what to do. That leads to much lower throughput,
I discussed how to calculate the Costs of Delay in the previous three posts, and then offered an example in Part 3. Notice that the example uses cycle time or how the team feels about the remaining time to think about the value in order to rank the work. (The links to all the posts
Ranking work, whether it’s for the backlog, a roadmap, or the portfolio, sometimes feels like throwing darts and hoping for the best. But especially if there’s too much work and a lot of WIP, we have a tool for clarifying that ranking—the Cost of Delay. It does require counting the number of people and easy
In Part 1, I explained the various Costs of Delays with this image: I explained how to calculate the salary costs in Part 1. Now, it’s time to calculate/assess Costs 2, 3, and 4 to decide on the most valuable work. (If you have Manage Your Project Portfolio, there’s an entire section about calculating and
If you’re like my clients (or me!), you have too much work to do. (I’m beginning to think “too much work” is the norm.) But how do you decide what to do first, second, and third? And never? I use Cost of Delay. (I’ve written about how to see the various Costs of Delay, especially
This is the August 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Problems. They’re always there, just waiting to pop up and say, “Surprise! Gotcha!” I don’t mind new problems, but the sneaky problems, the ones that reappear after I thought I fixed them? I really
During a sunset sail last week (see the image), I had a lovely conversation with a guy who said he did “accounting” type stuff. I asked him more, and it turns out he works for a three-letter acronym organization. No, I don’t know which one, even though I asked. He’s trying to organize a project