About Johanna Rothman
Johanna consults, speaks, and writes about managing product development. She helps managers and leaders do reasonable things that work. You can read more of her writings at jrothman.com.
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Hours, Velocity, Silo’d Teams, & Gantts
I’ve been having some email conversations with some project and program managers turned Scrum Masters. In general here’s how things have proceeded:Their organizations decided ...
Becoming a Leading Manager
My most recent post, We Cannot Choose Between Management And Leadership, has struck a chord. That’s the good news. The bad news is I have not defined enough terms. Okay, I’ll attempt ...
Why an Agile Project Manager is Not a Scrum Master
A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons:The project manager and product ...
Estimating the Unknown: Dates or Budgets, Part 1
Almost every manager I know wants to know when a project will be done. Some managers decree when a project will be done. Some managers think they can decree both the date and the feature ...
Estimating the Unknown: Dates or Budgets, Part 2
In Part 1, you had some knowledge of the team’s velocity. This is the option of when you do not have knowledge of the team’s velocity, because this team has not worked together ...
Programs and Technical Debt
Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical ...
Why Does Management Care About Velocity?
I’ve been talking to people whose management cares about their velocity. “My management wants us to double our velocity.” Or, “My management wants us to do more in a sprint.” ...
Infrastructure, Technical Debt, and Automated Test Framework
I’ve had several conversations in email and with clients recently that have all been about this question: “What do we do about our infrastructure?” Either the project or the program ...
Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams
I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they ...
