Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Cliff, an IT Director was concerned. One of the projects was a mess. It didn’t seem to matter how much or how little the team had for requirements. The team never seemed to release enough on time. Cliff had only been with the organization for four weeks. Yet, that team seemed to have more trouble …
A couple of weeks ago, I delivered the first version of my Free Your Agile Team talk at Agile New England. Here’s a direct link to the video. I spoke about the problem of a framework-first approach to transforming to an agile culture. I also spoke about the plethora of team-based coaches and the insufficiency of management coaching. (I …
Continue reading “Free Your Agile Team Video Posted (Includes Q&A)”
One of the big problems I see with a product orientation (as opposed to a project) is in preparing for ongoing work. You might not start the next project for this product after you complete this project. You might have to round-robin projects for various products because you don’t have enough people to do all …
Continue reading “Product Orientation Requires Technical Excellence”
I recorded a Being Human podcast with Richard Atherton. It’s wide-ranging from thinking about agile approaches as a way to improve organizational flow and what that means for us as humans. I had a blast. I think Richard did, too. He’s a think-before-he-speaks person, and if you watch the video, you can see him thinking. …
When I teach any sort of product/project/portfolio management, I ask, “Who believes multitasking works?” Always, at least several managers raise their hands. They believe multitasking works because they multitask all the time. Why? Because the managers have short work-time and long decision-wait time. If you are a manager, your time for any given decision looks …
Continue reading “Why Managers Believe Multitasking Works: Long Decision Wait Times”
Agile transformations are tough. That’s because wherever you start, the agile transformation creates culture clashes. Often, teams start with agile approaches. Teams discover the agile approach and practices that work for that team. Then, as the team gains experience, they refine their approach and practices. That’s the external part of what we see in an agile transformation. …
Continue reading “The Manager’s Role in an Agile Transformation”
One of my clients has many reasons for wanting an agile transformation. Their old products are at the end of their lives. They need agile approaches so they can get feedback from customers as they develop the new products. They need to deliver to their customers more often. They need to create a mix of …
Continue reading “Agile Transformation When Failure Is “Not” an Option”
Ron Jeffries, Matt Barcomb, and several other people wrote an interesting thread about prescriptive and non-prescriptive approaches to team-based agile. The issues are nuanced and for me, don’t lend themselves to a Twitter discussion. (Learning how to write short and coherently is a different post.) If you don’t want to read the entire thread, here …
Continue reading “Agile Approaches Require Management Cultural Change”
As Mark Kilby and I work on the geographically distributed teams book, I realized this morning that we need to define cost per feature. I already wrote Wage Cost and Project Labor Cost and the management myth that it’s cheaper to hire people where the wages are less expensive. (It might be, but it might …
As Mark Kilby and I work through the images and text for the geographically distributed teams book, I wanted to clarify what collocated and distributed mean. Collocated teams sit near each other in space. However, not everyone agrees on what is “near.” In Developing Products in Half the Time, Smith and Reinertsen use the Allen …
Continue reading “Understanding Distance for a Geographically Distributed Team”