Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
In my role as technical editor for agileconnection.com, I have the opportunity to read many terrific articles. I also have the opportunity to review and comment on those articles. One such comment is what do teams do? Do they “gel” or do they “jell”? Gel is what you put in hair. When you “gel” things, …
I’m shopping for furniture for our new house. I need a chair or a sofa for our family room, lights, all kinds of things. I was on Facebook, and there was an ad that looked interesting. I thought, “Should I click?” I clicked anyway. The site wants my email address. I can’t see anything without …
Many years ago, I was part of a task force to “standardize” project management at an organization. I suggested we gather some data to see what kinds of projects the client had. They had short projects, where it was clear what they had to do: 1-3 week projects where 2-4 people could run with the …
I have a new column up on project management.com. It’s called Debugging Your Geographically Distributed Agile Team. (You have to register to read it. Registration is free.) You can do agile with geographically distributed teams. You might not be able to do Scrum. You have other choices of approaches. Helping a team form is tough. …
Continue reading “Debugging Your Geographically Distributed Agile Team Posted”
Back when I was a Director of many things at one company, we had an urgent patch to go to a customer. My VP wanted it “yesterday.” Well, time only goes in one direction. I gathered my continuing engineering team, explained the pickle we were in. “Everyone wants this patch right away. However the customer …
Continue reading “Understanding State vs. the Micromanagement Trap”
Thanks to George Dinwiddie, who pointed me to the hashtag #FiveWordTechHorrors. I have been enjoying that stream. I found “We Only Hire Rock Stars” at some point. I realized I had not written about a common hiring trap in a very long time. Yes, you should hire “stars.” They have to be stars who fit …
Glen Alleman seems to have nailed it, with Alert – Was Poor PM the Root Cause of ACA Difficulties? Among the many problems: No overall program manager No way for stakeholders to know what Done looks like (no release criteria) No replanning I’m a huge fan of rolling wave planning. (Read Starting with Rolling Wave …
I’ve been having some strange email conversations with two testers, one business analyst, and a project manager. Yes, a total of four new people. They have each found jobs on projects. And, they are in over their heads. Each of them wrote to me, hoping I would help. The testers wanted to know how to …
I’ve been working with folks making their transition to agile. One of the hardest transitions is for the managers and technical leaders. Managers are accustomed to working in timeboxes. To them, the iteration is a timebox. But, they also are accustomed to features spanning multiple timeboxes, and that’s not OK in agile. They are accustomed …
So where does all of this get us with budgets and dates? In many ways, estimating project budgets or dates for agile projects turns out to be irrelevant. If you have a ranked backlog, and you finish features, you can always stop the project if you hit a particular date or cost. It does matter …
Continue reading “Estimating the Unknown: Dates or Budgets, Part 5”