Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Some of my clients have struggled with their project governance as they move to agile approaches. In the past, they’ve asked for estimates and costs—by requirement—and then tracked the variance for those estimates and costs. The governance people do not record assumptions. They only record estimates and actuals. They want to “measure” the project success …
Continue reading “Cost vs Value Measurements for Agile Approaches”
When we manage product development for organizations, we work for hire. The company hires you, pays you a wage, and in return, your intellectual property belongs to them. When you’re creating a product larger than one person can create, this is an excellent proposition. While “one person” may have had the original idea, we need …
I’ve been pair-writing a book with Mark Kilby, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. We hit a big milestone today: We published the first complete draft today. We’ve been working on this book for a year. It’s much better because of our collaboration. We reflected a little on our success to …
Continue reading “Successful Geographically Distributed Agile Teams Book Milestone”
I’ve been thinking about my clients who’ve had success moving from a project-based/resource-efficiency organization to a product-based/flow efficiency organization. They had these things in common: A senior person made it safe for the managers to create experiments. They created very small experiments (either managers or teams, or together). The senior manager often asked a question …
Continue reading “Starting a Product Organization Transformation, Part 6”
How do we move from a project-based organization towards a product organization? There are at least two systems of work we need to change: The management system and the culture of management How the teams work and their team culture. I’m not sure it’s that simple to explain. There might be more systems I don’t …
Continue reading “Possible Organization Changes for a Product Approach, Part 5”
How could we organize if we want flow efficiency? We would reward managers by their span of service instead of control, part 3, stop organizing by function, and move to something that looks like a product-based organization? My transforming idea for this question was to think about the organization as legacy code. We understand how to …
Continue reading “Possible Changes for a Product Approach, Part 4”
This series is about how you might move to a product-based organization. Part 1 was about how when we organize by function, the recognition and rewards might prevent a successful agile transformation. Part 2 was about one possibility for moving to a product-based organization. Before we get to who moves where, we need to consider the manager …
Continue reading “Defining the Manager’s Role for a Product Approach, Part 3”
If you’re thinking about an agile transformation, you already know about feature teams. You might even call them/use them as product teams. You might wonder about organizing all the work as product work. See Your Current Organization Many organizations use functions to organize people. The “Typical Product Development Organization” shows the kind of organization I …
Continue reading “Designing an Organization for a Product Approach, Part 1”
In Part 1, I suggested that when we organize by function, the recognition and rewards might prevent a successful agile transformation. In this part, I’ll discuss an option for a product-oriented organization. Consider a Product-Oriented Organization Instead of organizing by function, consider a product-oriented organization. Again, I am not saying this is the only way …
Continue reading “Designing an Organization for a Product Approach, Part 2”
We hear a lot these days about project-based organizations vs. product-based organizations. Much of what we do in software is in service of products. Products tend to evolve over time. When we work on projects, we learn from the experience. However, once we finish this release, the “product” (the output of the project) doesn’t change …