This is Johanna Rothman’s July 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Mike, a new senior leader, wants to know when Engineering will deliver specific projects. He would prefer more accurate estimates, but he’s okay with relative sizing, such as: Small projects: Not more than a quarter (12 […]
This is the March 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Susan, a product leader, has a big problem. One of the senior managers, Tim, often wants to know the cost (or time) required for a new feature or a new product. So he asks
I have never found Gantt charts to be useful. When I say that to my clients, some of them tell me they do find use in Gantt charts. Specifically, the people who like Gantt charts say they can predict where the project is headed. In addition, they can see the various interdependencies across the work.
In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1, I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency, where we focus on watching the work, not the people. Too few organizations can do that. But teams can change how they work—in any approach. Here are three suggestions to emulate flow efficiency
In How Centralization Decisions Create Friction, Increase Cycle Time, and Cost Money, Part 1, I discussed how removing support staff for departments and managers created longer cycle times. (And sometimes, increased friction so much that people could not easily do their jobs.) Removing those support staff was one indication the companies fell into the Economies
In the first post, How Centralization Decisions Create Friction, Increase Cycle Time, and Cost Money, Part 1, I explained how centralizing even relatively small decisions to centralize has high costs. Why do organizations centralize? To supposedly capitalize on “economies of scale.” That’s the problem of understanding the cost of work—but not the value of that
I started this series with the issues of trying to estimate/predict a specific backlog item quarters away, not even weeks away. (Even weeks away is iffy because the entropy is the default state for the world.) In Part 1, I suggested that the team can use cycle time, but even with cycle time, we need
In How to Predict When the Team Will Complete a Specific Backlog Item, Part 1, I said there was no way to accurately predict an estimate for a specific backlog item more than a month away. I did suggest several options if you want to go through the motions, but there’s no accurate answer to
Your team has one of those long roadmaps or a long backlog. They’re working, delivering about two items (full stories) a week. Then, your manager asks you this question: “That feature set in six months: when will you start it and when will you finish it?” “We could start it now,” you say, “assuming we
Most projects encounter problems at some point, regardless of the size of the team and the people’s capabilities. For example, in a six-person team, TeamA, Tom resigned to follow his wife to her new job. Dick became quite ill and went out on short-term disability for the next three months. And Harry needed significant time