I had dinner with a colleague. While we were settling into our coffee, he asked me, “What does post-agile mean to you?” I was no longer calm and relaxed. “That’s a nonsense word. Post-agile!” Here’s why I reacted the way I did. We have known about miniature milestones, or inch-pebbles, since the 1940s. That’s how […]
I read the Business Week opening remarks, How Optimism Strengthens Economies. See this quote at the end: the group of people who turn out to be most accurate about predicting how long it will take to complete tasks—and how likely they are to succeed—are the clinically depressed. Optimists underestimate how difficult it will be to succeed.
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager with a few agile projects and a traditional project. How do you manage the program? Possible Technical Program with Communities of Practice Above is my drawing of what a technical program team looks like. Sally’s project is actually a small program itself. Sally is
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager, with a couple of agile projects, and a couple of traditional projects. How do you manage the program? Here’s what a program team looks like. For the sake of argument, assume that Sally is an agile program manager, because we can tell she’s working
I’m in Las Vegas waiting to get on a plan to Los Angeles to go to New Zealand for SDC. I led a workshop yesterday for real estate project managers about how to define success and manage some of the early-in-the-project risks. We discussed issues such as the Hudson Bay start, context-free questions, release criteria,
Summary: While managing a long project, it’s easy to lose track of progress. And, when that happens, how do you even know whether you’re still making progress? In this article, Johanna Rothman offers suggestions to help you take your project one step at a time and keep it under control. When I coach managers or
Summary: Knowing how much work your group can accomplish–and how much it takes to complete that work–is critical to your success as a manager. In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman explains how to ascertain your team’s potential and how to use that information to define and manage your project portfolio so it doesn’t manage you. I
Imagine you’re a project manager. You talk to your technical lead and ask how far along the team is. “Oh, we’re about 90 percent done,” he says. If you’re like most project managers, your heart sinks. You’ve been here before. Ninety percent done means the other 90 percent is left to do. But what can
I meet many managers in the course of my work, and they all share a common complaint: They have too much work to do. I ask how they know there’s too much work to do, and they look at me as if I’ve sprouted another head or two. “My staff and I are spread too
© 2005 Johanna Rothman. Some project managers considering moving to iterative, incremental, or agile lifecycles, stumble when it comes time to move to rolling wave planning. They aren’t sure how to start it, how to continue it, or how to see where the project is without using a more traditional Gantt chart and planning the