Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Projects have problems. That’s why we select life cycles, approaches, and apply risk management as we proceed so we can manage these problems. What’s your #1 project problem? The nice folks at Mavenlink identified 5 major challenges in project management. Here are the top 3: Project plans and scheduling are not aligned (45%) Contention for …
Back in Manage It!, I suggested that for requirements, the questions should be, “How little can we do?” and still have a great product. My argument was this: the longer the project (regardless of approach), the more risk there is. Can you reduce risk by reducing the requirements? That would allow you to release earlier …
Continue reading “How Little Can You Do (& Still be Effective)”
One of the challenges as an organization becomes agile is what to do with HR and Finance. How can HR and Finance become more agile? In this series, I’ll address HR (Human Resources). (I’d actually started drafting this series a few months ago, but Diana Larsen pinged me with her note of Human Resources Is Dead. …
We might start to think about agile approaches as a project change. However, if you want to “scale” agile, the entire culture changes. Here is a list of the series and how everything changes the organization’s culture: Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams. Without feature teams, I don’t see how you can …
Continue reading “Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 6: Creating the Agile Organization”
One of the challenges I see in organizations is how managers can use agile approaches. One of the biggest problems is that the entire organization is organized for resource efficiency (think silos of functional experts). Agile approaches use flow efficiency. Thinking in flow efficiency changes everything. Many people in organizations believe that dividing up the …
Continue reading “Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 5: Agile Management”
Bob Sutton (@work_matters) tweeted this the other day: Perhaps companies ought to stop using “IC” or “Individual Contributor.” It seems to absolve such employees from helping others I retweeted it and we had some back-and-forth about what to call people i organizations. Let’s eliminate these words for people who are not managers: Individual Contributor: There …
Continue reading “Thinking About What to Call Team Members and Managers”
As I finish the agile project management book (Create Your Successful Agile Project), I am working on what stays in this book and what I use in the agile management book (next up after the PO book). That leads me to this question: What do you call a transition to agile approaches? Is there a …
Continue reading “What’s the “Right” Term for an Agile Transition or Transformation?”
Have you ever worked on a project where the management and/or sponsors felt it necessary to provide you warnings: “This release better do this or have that. Otherwise, you’re toast.” I have, once. That’s when I started to use release criteria and check with the sponsors/management to make sure they agreed. I happen to like …
Many people use an iteration approach to agile. They decide on an iteration duration, commit to work for that iteration and by definition, they are done at the end of the timebox. I like timeboxing many things. I like timeboxing work I don’t know how to start. I find short timeboxes help me focus on the …
I had a conversation with Amitai Schleier last year. I told him how much I enjoyed Agile in 3 Minutes (the podcast). I learned something from each podcast. He invited me to contribute one. Naturally, I chose management. My podcast, 34: Manage is up. If you like the podcast, you should check out the book, too. See …