Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
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 spoke with a project manager recently. She told me her story. I used to facilitate project teams as a project manager. Why a project manager? Because the project had a beginning and an end. We had (and still have) too many products to keep the same teams on them for a long time. For …
Continue reading “Agile Project Manager, Scrum Master, or Product Owner?”
Part 1 was about seeing the value in the various projects. I called the value stream a product so that people would think about who would use it and why. I suggested that we stop work on specific products when you have more products than teams. That would allow you to work on other projects …
Continue reading “Projects, Products, and the Project Portfolio: Part 2, Assess & Rank the Work”
I listened to The Ultimate Metric: Identifying the Right Problems to Solve. The guest, Janelle Klein, said: Technical debt is not a loan I thought that was brilliant. She went on to explain that when we talk about “debt” managers think they have dials to manage the debt. Uh oh. Wrong. When managers think in …
If you read my Three Alternatives to Making Smaller Stories, you noticed one thing. In each of these examples, the problem was in the teams’ ability to show progress and create interim steps. But, what about when you have a “wicked” problem, when you don’t know if you can create the answer? If you are …
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When I was in Israel a couple of weeks ago teaching workshops, one of the big problems people had was large stories. Why was this a problem? If your stories are large, you can’t show progress, and more importantly, you can’t change. For me, the point of agile is the transparency—hey, look at what we’ve …
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If you saw Large Program? Release More Often, you might have noted that I said, You want to release all the time inside your building. You need the feedback, to watch the product grow. Some of my clients have said, “But my customers don’t want the software that often.” That might be true. You may …
Continue reading “Small Internal Releases Lead to Happy Customers”
I write a twice-yearly column for Better Software magazine. The title of the column is called “Technically Speaking.” For this column, I decide to tackle the question of “What’s a Professional?” If you don’t already subscribe to the magazine, you do have to join the site. It’s a free registration to join.
We got here because I started with Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program. That got me to Organizing an Agile Program, Part 1:Introduction, Organizing an Agile Program, Part 2: Networks for Managing Agile Programs, Organizing an Agile Program Part 3: Large Programs Demand Servant Leadership. Sorry I got behind. Life interfered. Some …
Continue reading “Organizing An Agile Program, Part 4: Start From the Teams and Work Up”
Many months ago, Rebecca asked an interesting question about technical debt in projects. She asked, How to start when there’s a really big mess? In that case, small, just being a professional clean-up acts may not even make a dent. Of course, as with any good question, the answer is, “it depends.” And the biggest …
Continue reading “Transition to Agile, Large Technical Debt, Small Project”