Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
After Mark Kilby and I collaborated on From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, we decided to start creating online classes. We have just opened registration for our first geographically distributed agile teams class. See Prepare for Successful Distributed Agile Teams. It’s a self-study class. That means you can proceed at your own pace. You’ll …
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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”
One of the experiences people miss in distributed teams compared to collocated teams is the ability to serendipitously bump into other team members or just other people. They like the idea of having random encounters to share what they did for the weekend or, more importantly, discuss problems they are struggling with at work. Sometimes …
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Dave, the tech lead, was trying to use an agile approach with his team. Four of the people worked together in a team room in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Two people worked from their homes in New Hampshire, and one person, the product owner, worked from her home in Indiana. Their agile approach wasn’t …
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Summary: Many managers and distributed team members think that if they just had the right tools, they could make some agile approach work. Maybe, but tools only enhance the work of a collaborative agile team. Before you select tools, make sure you have people who can work together and have enough skills and capabilities for …
Continue reading “For Distributed Agile Teams, It’s Not All about the Tools”
In our previous article, we discussed the importance of sufficient hours of overlap in managing a team’s workspace. As a reminder, here are the four components we see that need to be managed in a distributed team workspace. Sufficient hours of overlap in everyone’s workday. Sufficient communications technology that supports everyone equally in synchronous and …
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I’ve been working with several managers at organizations large and small, who want to capitalize their software “earlier.” These managers have some strongly-held beliefs about the people: People are resources Resources can multitask on several projects at a time If “headquarters” does the difficult work, you can move the “grunt” work to lower wage areas …
Back at Agile 2018, I had a chance to record a podcast with Bob Payne. The recording is Johanna Rothman – Agile 2018. We discussed my experience report with Mark Kilby, the geographically distributed agile teams book with Mark, and my roadmapping session. I’ve known Bob forever. I think of him as a friend and as …
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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You might remember I’m working on a book with Mark Kilby. It’s From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. We just published a new version of the book. We rearranged the entire book. In this version, we added a chapter called “Avoid Chaos with Insufficient Hours of Overlap.” That one chapter might …
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