Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Many people use an iteration approach to agile. They decide on an iteration duration, commit to work for that iteration and by definition, they are done at the end of the timebox. I like timeboxing many things. I like timeboxing work I don’t know how to start. I find short timeboxes help me focus on the …
As I’m teaching my Practical Product Owner workshop, some POs are having trouble understanding how big a defect is. Sure, they want to have small(er) stories, but a defect isn’t done until it’s all fixed, and the team has decided if they need automated regression tests added to the smoke tests. So, here are three …
A colleague asked me for some tips about writing. With hundreds of articles, blog posts, and 10 books, I know what works for me. I suspect some of these ideas will work for you, too. Tip 1: Write every day. Write for 15 minutes every day. This practice exercises your writing muscles. For me, it’s …
Cesar Abeid interviewed me, Project Management for You with Johanna Rothman. We talked about my tools for project management, whether you are managing a project for yourself or managing projects for others. We talked about how to use timeboxes in the large and small, project charters, influence, servant leadership, a whole ton of topics. I …
I posted my slides for my Agile 2014 talk, Agile Projects, Program & Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required on Slideshare. It’s a bootcamp talk, so the majority of the talk is making sure that people understand the basics about projects. Walk before you run. That part. However, you can take projects and “scale” them …
In Manage Your Job Search, I suggest the job hunter timebox everything. But what does that look like? Here are some examples. Imagine you want to research companies to put on your target list. I say you need 25 companies on your target list in the networking chapter. You roll your eyes and you are …
Today’s job search trap is something we can all identify with: biting off a big chunk of work and not getting it to done fast enough. I suspect we have all been there and done that! How do you avoid this particular trap? I like to assess each of my tasks on my board and …
Did you see Dwayne Phillips’ post today, Adding People to a Late Project? Dwayne says: Adding people to a late project only makes it later. We have known this for decades. Especially in the article he refers to, it seems as if there might be no end to the number of people added. Did anyone …
In Organizing an Agile Program, Part 1, Introduction, I suggested you think about the communication paths of your programs. Instead of hierarchies, I suggested you think of networks of teams. In Organizing an Agile Program Part 2, Networks for Managing Agile Programs, I showed you how loosely connected networks might work. I explained how you …
Continue reading “Organizing an Agile Program, Part 3, Large Programs Demand Servant Leadership”
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”