This is Johanna Rothman’s July 2026 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this newsletter. (Looking for the video? I post the video within a few days of publication on my YouTube channel.) Are you drowning in work? While I mostly speak with project and program managers, or “people” managers, everyone […]
This is Johanna Rothman’s February 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Jim, one of my trusted advisor clients, was all gung-ho on AI last year. He told me that his AI work allowed their senior management team to define their strategy, “once and for all.” That strategy was
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
Does your organization use a PMO as a way to manage the various P functions: project, program, and portfolio management? Plenty of organizations do use PMOs. However, I rarely see them as effective in furthering the organization’s operational excellence or the strategy. Instead, I too often see them as yet another function that creates delays
I keep seeing too much micromanagement in organizations. That’s where managers decide for the people they lead and serve, not with the people they lead and serve. Micromanagement creates several problems: People stop learning how to solve problems because the manager steps in to tell them what to do. That leads to much lower throughput,
This is the June 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. A newsletter reader asked me this question: Are there common reasons that projects fail? There are. These reasons aren’t just for product development projects, but for any effort that has some risk and requires
Jenny, a product leader, glared at her supposed product backlog. She’d just transferred to this product and now she knew why the teams weren’t making progress. This backlog was more like her overstuffed sports closet. That closet had tennis rackets, a bat, and her two pairs of skis—all sports, but not for any one specific
Many of my middle-management and senior leadership clients want certainty about future work. That’s one of the reasons they create huge backlogs and long roadmaps. Yet, even those backlogs and roadmaps don’t offer certainty. One of these managers said, “I have so much uncertainty and ambiguity. I feel as if I can’t make a good,
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