Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
I’ve been working at the intersection of the project portfolio and the product roadmaps. (You can tell because of the various posts about information persistence.) Here’s what I find when I work with my clients: They have years worth of projects in the project portfolio. They have years worth of ideas in various states of description in …
I was on vacation last week, thinking about value. Depending on my role, I might think of value as: Delivery of a feature or story, assuming it’s the right level of quality and when I want it. Information about the story. This might include information from the team about what they think about this story, …
As I write the program management book, I am struck by how difficult it is to estimate large chunks of work. In Predicting the Unpredictable and Manage It!, I recommend several approaches to estimation, each of which include showing that there is no one absolute date for a project or a program. What can you do? …
One of my program management clients is organizing a program and is having trouble thinking about a delivery model that fits their program. They are transitioning to agile and are accustomed to traditional releases. When I suggested they have someone representing deployment on their core team, that was an initial shock to their system, and …
Continue reading “Agile Program Management: How Will You Deliver?”
Do you have a product owner who doesn’t want to admit to technical debt? “Give me another feature! And another feature! Just keep giving me features! It’s feature time, baby!” Once a product owner has the heady feeling of seeing features one after the other, it’s difficult for that product owner to consider anything other …
Continue reading “Managing Technical Debt in an Agile Project”
I’ve had several conversations in email and with clients recently that have all been about this question: “What do we do about our infrastructure?” Either the project or the program has to create/update/upgraded their architecture or automated test infrastructure, pay down technical debt, or somehow do something that’s not part of a story. And, that’s …
Continue reading “Thoughts on Infrastructure, Technical Debt, and Automated Test Framework”
I hope that by now you see that you have any number of choices for your lifecycle if you are geographically distributed team and you are transitioning to agile. I do recommend a servant leader agile project manager, for coordination and risk management. With people all over the world, it’s difficult to coordinate the project, …
Continue reading “Geographically Distributed Agile Teams Have Choices for Their Lifecycles”
Example 3: Using a Project Manager with Iterations and Kanban and Silo’d Teams Here, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations, …
Continue reading “Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 3”
A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons: The project manager and product owner start the release planning and ask the team if the release planning is ok. The team does not generate the initial draft of release planning …
Continue reading “Why an Agile Project Manager is Not a Scrum Master”
Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California. This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were …
Continue reading “Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 2”