Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Mark Kilby and I have finished the first four chapters of From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. We thought we had five finished chapters. Then we realized how much more work we had, to move from Google docs to Markdown. Sigh. We have four finished chapters 🙂 And, we know how to collaborate in …
Continue reading “Early Version of Distributed Agile Teams Book is Available”
I’ve been a part of geographically distributed teams since the mid-80s. I’ve taught and written about agile distributed teams for several years Now, I’m pair-writing a geographically distributed agile teams book with Mark Kilby. We’ve tweeted a little. We’ll be talking about our process at Agile 2018 in an experience report. We need your help. …
As Mark Kilby and I work on the geographically distributed teams book, I realized this morning that we need to define cost per feature. I already wrote Wage Cost and Project Labor Cost and the management myth that it’s cheaper to hire people where the wages are less expensive. (It might be, but it might …
As Mark Kilby and I work through the images and text for the geographically distributed teams book, I wanted to clarify what collocated and distributed mean. Collocated teams sit near each other in space. However, not everyone agrees on what is “near.” In Developing Products in Half the Time, Smith and Reinertsen use the Allen …
Continue reading “Understanding Distance for a Geographically Distributed Team”
I’m writing a geographically distributed agile team book with Mark Kilby. We have a 30-minute timebox each morning to write. (We take time off for holidays, vacations, travel, etc.) Because we’re writing together, we first had to understand what we wanted to write in this book. We created a frame and a story map for …
Last year, I was part of a geographically distributed team who wrote the Agile Practice Guide. Shane Hastie interviewed us during Agile 2017. His interview (which was a ton of fun!) is here: Johanna Rothman and Mike Griffiths on the Agile Alliance/PMI Agile Practice Guide. I learned a ton from that writing experience: Geographically distributed agile …
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I just read Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software. I’m not surprised. That’s because we are humans who work with other human people. I want to talk with people when I want to talk with them, not when some protocol tells me I must. It’s the same problem when …
People often ask me, “When is agile right or not right for a project?” I’ve said before that if the team wants to go agile, that’s great. If the team doesn’t, don’t use agile. That answer is insufficient. In addition to the team, we need management to not create a bad environment for agile. You …
Lisette Sutherland posted a podcast we recorded about geographically distributed agile teams. See Organize Your Distributed Team over on the CollaborationSuperpowers site. We covered how you can think about your geographically distributed agile team: Why you want a distributed agile team (yes, there are some great reasons) How you might organize your team. Here are …
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If you’re the project manager for a geographically distributed team, you have likely encountered time zone challenges in running your meetings: 7 a.m. New York time is 8 p.m. in Singapore. Meetings at these times can exhaust everyone. Here’s a common scenario faced by managers of distributed teams: “We’ll have our next standup tomorrow, same …
Continue reading “Agile Alternatives for a Geographically Distributed Team”