Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Israel Gat had a great Agile Cutter Advisor recently, the Friction of Agile (registration required). He discussed the friction of agile going up in geographically distributed teams because of the dis-economies of assimilation (the space-time continuum problem, and the issue of under-funding the infrastructure of the non US-based teams). He had a stunning (to me) …
As I work with more organizations and across more cultures, I’ve been realizing that agile exposes a huge piece of the power in the organization that many people may not want exposed. I didn’t have a name for until I read Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. In it, he talks about Hofstede’s Power distance …
I’m a pragmatic realist. So, in my program management workshop and in my geographically distributed teams workshop, and in a number of my other talks and workshops this year (and next year), I’m talking about influence. Of course, I’m addressing the issue of influence without authority. You never have enough authority to do the job …
Continue reading “Further Your Influence Skills: Vancouver & Potsdam”
Shane Hastie and I have been working across timezones in preparation for a workshop: Working Effectively With Distributed Agile Teams. I’m keynoting at SDC in a couple of weeks, and am looking forward to being back in Wellington and Sydney. First, Shane and I built a backlog in Google docs, so we could both see …
Continue reading “Working Across Timezones: Wellington and Sydney”
I have an article on Computerworld.com, Three Tips to Managing Across the Globe. Please leave comments here (because you can’t leave comments there.)
© 2005 Johanna Rothman. So you’re managing people and projects around the world. It’s not easy, and it seems to be the norm these days. I’ve worked with global projects for the past 15 years, and here are three of my tips to making them successful. Define Clear, System-Based Milestones One of the biggest problems …
Introduction Any project where people bring different assumptions about working norms (either in product development or team behavior) is a multicultural project. Even when all project participants are from one country, the project manager (PM) may still have to deal with multiple cultures and those cultures’ expectations and behaviors. Some of the team differences are …
Continue reading “Managing Multicultural Projects with Complementary Practices”
More companies are looking towards globally dispersed software development teams to solve project staffing problems and make critical time-to-market deadlines. This trend is a fundamental change in how software projects are organized and implemented. Using the idea of “concurrent engineering” to deliver projects faster, you break up a project into smaller, less complex pieces and …
Continue reading “Six Tips for Making Global Software Development Work”
Abstract If you manage software engineers, or software product development, sooner or later, you will be faced with a vexing problem: not all the people are in one place, or even in one time zone. This paper analyzes the problems associated with geographically distributed product development, and discusses possible solutions to reduce project risk. Real …
Continue reading “Making Geographically Dispersed Development Work”