Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
What risks does your project have? Do you need feedback loops so you can: Cancel the project at any time (to manage schedule and cost risks. Assess technical risks so you can rework the architecture or design to manage feature set risks. Manage what you release to customers so you can manage defect, feature set, …
Continue reading “What Lifecycle or Agile Approach Fits Your Context? Part 7, Lifecycle Summary”
The original signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development wanted to solve these specific problems: How can we: Bring more adaptability to software development? Stop “plan the work and work the plan” thinking? Release something of value earlier? Especially since teams now had these levers, from the iterative and incremental approaches: Prototype something for …
I discussed the origins of the agile approaches in Part 5. In this post, I’ll discuss how you can create an agile approach that fits your context. Why should you create your own agile approach? Because your context is unique to you, your team, project, product, and culture. You deserve an agile approach that helps …
Which levers does your team need to manage risk in your project? Do you need to cancel the project if you can’t finish a phase? You might not have the time. You might not have the ability to do this project. That’s the point of Serial lifecycles in Part 1. Maybe you need feedback from …
So far, we’ve discussed the lever of canceling a project at any time with the serial lifecycles in Part 1. That’s assuming you replan and/or cancel. We added another lever of looking for more feedback with iterating over the requirements in the iterative lifecycles in Part 2. Teams have another lever. They can release increments …
Back in Part 1, I wrote about how stage-gate approaches were as agile as we could use at the time. We had one delivery, so our agility was about canceling the project if we couldn’t finish it. However, some smart people also realized that we had another lever, aside from estimation, to replan the project. …
Continue reading “What Lifecycle or Agile Approach Fits Your Context? Part 2, Iterative Lifecycles”
Are you trying to make an agile framework or approach work? Maybe you have technical or schedule risk. Maybe you’ve received a mandate to “go agile.” Maybe you’d like to experiment with better ways of working. Or, maybe you’re trying to fit an agile framework into your current processes—and you’ve got a mess. You’re not …
Continue reading “What Lifecycle or Agile Approach Fits Your Context? Part 1, Serial Lifecycles”
Some organizations find OKRs help them create superior objectives and achieve some of them. (OKRs are Objectives and Key Results.) The idea is that every quarter you use the company purpose to create audacious Objectives. Each objective then has 3-5 Key Results so you can measure how well you do. You’re not supposed to achieve …
Many people talk about “going back to normal.” We aren’t going to return to normal. That old normal is gone, at least for a year, if not longer. (I suspect we will cycle between remote work and office work for the foreseeable future.) What we can do is discover a new normal. Discovery requires different …
Continue reading “We Won’t Return to Normal; We Will Discover Normal”
Back when I was a manager, my senior management wanted to separate the “new” work from the “maintenance” work. I suggested that every new line after the first line of code was maintenance. The managers poo-poohed me. My concern: How would the “new” developers learn from their mistakes? I lost that discussion and I managed …
Continue reading “Effects of Separating “New” Work vs “Maintenance” Work”