Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
In a conversation about product quality, the product owner said, “If the testers found the problems faster, we would be done faster.” The tester said, “If the developers didn’t put so many problems in, we’d be done by now.” The developer said, “If you didn’t pressure me so much, I could have done a better …
Continue reading “Managers Make the Real Product Quality Decisions”
We’ve all heard of big organizations where the top management said, “No need to ever be back in the office. Work from home, as long as you want.” And, the Wall Street Journal has this article, Business Travel Won’t Be Taking Off Soon Amid Coronavirus (you might need to subscribe to see the article). (I …
Several years ago, a client, Alex, asked me, “What’s wrong with this team? They don’t want to learn anything.” I was surprised. I asked him for more information. “Well, when I ask them to use TDD, they don’t want to even learn about it. When I ask them to use CI, they don’t want to. …
Continue reading “Team Improvement: Management Desires vs Team Reality”
Back when I was a manager, my senior management wanted to separate the “new” work from the “maintenance” work. I suggested that every new line after the first line of code was maintenance. The managers poo-poohed me. My concern: How would the “new” developers learn from their mistakes? I lost that discussion and I managed …
Continue reading “Effects of Separating “New” Work vs “Maintenance” Work”
I keep encountering managers and consultants who want to make work “fun” for people. As a goal, “fun” is a bunch of hooey. Before I was a consultant, I held various Director-level positions at local companies. Each organization had mandatory fun days. In one organization, we played softball. Yes, everyone—especially the managers—had to play softball …
Early on in my agile practice, I believed in generalizing specialists. I even wrote Five Tips to Hiring a Generalizing Specialist. However, if a team becomes collaborative, I no longer think we need generalizing specialists. That’s because the team works and learns as a team. If a team is willing to collaborate as pairs, a …
Continue reading “Rethinking the Need for Generalizing Specialists”
Dave, the tech lead, was trying to use an agile approach with his team. Four of the people worked together in a team room in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Two people worked from their homes in New Hampshire, and one person, the product owner, worked from her home in Indiana. Their agile approach wasn’t …
Continue reading “Distributed Team Workspaces Start With Hours of Overlap”
There’s a twitter conversation about how to manage team compensation. How can we pay people what they are worth and compensate a team for their value? I know there are teams where I was quite valuable—not because I was “the” leader, but because I helped the team achieve our goals. And, there are teams where I …
Continue reading “Possibilities for Managing Individual and Team Compensation”
Bob Sutton (@work_matters) tweeted this the other day: Perhaps companies ought to stop using “IC” or “Individual Contributor.” It seems to absolve such employees from helping others I retweeted it and we had some back-and-forth about what to call people i organizations. Let’s eliminate these words for people who are not managers: Individual Contributor: There …
Continue reading “Thinking About What to Call Team Members and Managers”
Several years ago, I wrote a post for a different blog called “Why Team Size Matters.” That post is long gone. I explained that the number of communication paths in the team does not increase linearly as the team size increases; team communication paths square when the team increases linearly. Here is the calculation where N is …