This is the December 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. I have the same problems as many of you do: I start something and then I realize it’s much larger than I expected. That occurred with this month’s newsletter. The problem I tried to […]
I had a wonderful time speaking with Arin Sime on his Scaling Tech podcast. Listen to the podcast here and see all the notes: Mastering True Agility with Johanna Rothman. That page also has a link to the video on YouTube. We had a wide-ranging conversation, all about reducing cycle time so teams and organizations
Have you seen the Forbes article that has zero idea how efficient engineering teams work? They have a whole long list of “inefficiencies”. This is a quote from that article: Marking oneself as “in a meeting” on Slack Scheduling communications (Slack messages, emails, and code commits) for off-hours to appear active Blocking out private calendar
This is the November 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.Is your “hybrid” team working? So far, most of my clients say, “No!” Managers think there’s not enough collaboration. Team members discover their meetings don’t work because the office is not sufficiently equipped with the
When I started working on projects, we thought we could use a serial/waterfall approach to project management and product development. While we were wrong, one very good thing happened in the 1970s and 1980s: We took the time at the end of each phase to do a little retrospective. Yes, even for a serial approach,
Each week for a little over a year, I’ve been recording a little podcast and video. It’s called “60 Seconds of Johanna’s Writing WIP.” I’m doing this as an experiment for two reasons: Market the writing before I publish it. (Yes, the “launch” is a form of marketing, but I’m also planning to experiment with
During a sunset sail last week (see the image), I had a lovely conversation with a guy who said he did “accounting” type stuff. I asked him more, and it turns out he works for a three-letter acronym organization. No, I don’t know which one, even though I asked. He’s trying to organize a project
A senior leader, Jim, emailed me to clarify how to track a project’s progress. He’s a sales guy by training and is now leading a technology-based company. He’s confused. When he asks about progress, he feels as if everyone takes one step forward and two steps back, just as in the Project Kisses of Death
In a recent conversation, I realized that very smart and experienced project managers do not always know the difference between activity-based plans and deliverable-based plans. While activities might result in an interim or internal deliverable, activities do not result in a user-focused deliverable. The team might make some progress, but not progress users can see.
I’m working on finishing a talk based on a recent Pragmatic Manager newsletter: Three Tips to Focus to Deliver Better Products Faster. I wrote that newsletter because I’d given several recent talks where the audience told me their “agile” teams could not collaborate. Those “teams” were component teams and they were not near each other.