Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I’m in Las Vegas waiting to get on a plan to Los Angeles to go to New Zealand for SDC. I led a workshop yesterday for real estate project managers about how to define success and manage some of the early-in-the-project risks. We discussed issues such as the Hudson Bay start, context-free questions, release criteria, …
Continue reading “Similarities and Differences in Project Management”
I’m sure you’ve read of the AIG scandal by now. (Here is the Fox News story and here is the CNN story.) Shame is too small a word for those executives. I would love to know where their entitlement comes from. I’d squish it like a bug. Maybe they went to the resort to do …
Continue reading “Resorts Aren't Necessary for Strategic Planning”
I spoke recently with a (new) Scrum Master with a team who’s new to Scrum. One of the team members is a little stuck. He doesn’t feel comfortable going to the task board to take a task when he’s done. He wants to wait until someone else is ready and then work with that person. …
Continue reading “Moving Team Members from Being Controlled to Taking Initiative”
One of the big problems in organizations (IT or product-shipping) is how to fund projects. I don’t believe in ROI (Return on Investment). I learned how to lie with ROI back in 1988–I can make the numbers be anything you want. If you don’t have ROI, how do you know what projects to fund? One …
I received two questions this week about how well does agile allow you to do traceability matrix. Very well is the short answer. Here’s why. If you commit to implementing features (not chunks of architecture) based on user stories in an iteration, you know what you’re planning before the iteration starts. Because you’re working in …
If you haven’t read Duane Nathaniel’s thoughtful comment on What Happens When You Can’t Finish What You Wanted in an Iteration?, do so now. Duane makes some great points. RUP has iterations; they’re not timeboxed–they’re deliverable-based. (Take a look at the link that Duane points to.) In the RUP, an iteration results in a deliverable. …
Pawel caught me being ambiguous. See his comment, “1. I’ve seen features/fixes which required 2 days to be developed and released.” Sorry, me too. But what I tried to say was this: A feature was estimated to be some duration of person-hours. Those person-hours have come and gone. The feature still requires another 10-12 …
I ran a little workshop today about transitioning to agile. I was talking about timeboxed iterations, and one of the participants asked this question. “So I don’t quite finish one of the features I want to finish in this iteration–and it’s the end of the project. I think it’s going to take me a …
Continue reading “What Happens When You Can't Finish What You Wanted in an Iteration?”
I facilitated a management problem-solving session at the STARWest conference yesterday. When I was debriefing the activities, one participant said he’s met a bunch of testers and test managers who had a “siege” mentality. He was surprised by that. I’m still surprised when I meet people like that. I sometimes see developers who feel …
Continue reading “Why Do Some Testers/Test Managers Have a Siege Mentality?”
A colleague asked me what to do when you’re in an iteration and you realize that the story you’re working on spawns other requirements. I suggested that the person add them to the product backlog (the backlog of everything you want to do for the product) and re-rank the requirements in preparation for the …