Imagine this scenario: You’re a project or program manager. You suspect things are not going swimmingly well. But no one has told you any bad news. Not yet. What do you do? As a facilitative leader, such as a project, program, or agile project manager (Scrum Master), it’s your job to seek out that bad
Last week, Ryan Latta offered a fascinating metric on LinkedIn: the number of times a leader taps a developer on the shoulder for “something real quick.” That kind of interruption makes it impossible for the team to achieve a regular cycle time. Worse, it creates aging. So more leaders want to know “why is everything
If you are like me, you use apps and websites to finish work every day. How often do those apps and sites break? Way too often. When possible, I report the problem. How long does it take to fix the problem? Sometimes, it takes those vendors days to fix their site. I expect only ten
This is Johanna Rothman’s March 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Most of us have heard of—or suffered through—schedule delays. That’s when the project or program feels tremendous pressure to deliver some specific value by a specific date. To achieve those dates, we often heard lies such
Several of my clients claim they have plans. But I don’t see the elements of a plan in what they do. Instead, I see wishes that the future will unfold in a particular way. I also have wishes. But the more we confuse them with plans, the less likely we will get the future we
As far as I can tell, all organizations have the appetite for more work than they have people or time to do that work. It does not matter if the organization is one person or thousands. We all want to accomplish more than we have people. That’s why we need a product vision to drive
I started this series by saying a team can create a useful project charter in less time than you think. So what prevents teams from doing so? Too often, the project is not ready. The team might be ready, but the project is not. In effect, the project starts with scarcity. (I used to think
Do you use schedule or tracking tools to predict the future? None of them can predict the future. Worse, too many of them hide the past, especially the recent past. A schedule or tracking tool can only predict one thing: the first possible date you cannot prove you cannot finish the project/story by. Let me
So far, I’ve addressed how a project charter can help a team start a project fast and well. That’s why the project charter must clarify product vision, the various project risks, and product risks. And, it’s equally important to know what done means. If the team does not know how little they can do to
In Project Charter Part 2: Clarify the Project Driver, Boundaries, and Constraints for This Project, I explained how project risks can affect the team’s approach to the work. But project risks are not the same as product risks. Product risks are about the need for product innovation. The more innovation this product needs, the more