Johanna Rothman

APRIL 14, 2021

One of my clients wants to use shared services “teams” as they start their agile transformation. Their developers work on a product for months and years at a time. ” Shared service-thinking denies the reality of effective product development: A cross-functional team learns together as they develop the product. .”

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LSA Global

APRIL 11, 2024

A Guide to Boosting Organizational Change Agility: The Top 6 Best Practices Most leaders understand that organizational change is both a constant and a necessity. Change management consulting experts define agility as the capacity of an organization to anticipate, respond to, and capitalize on internal and external changes.

Agile 36

Agile Culture Change Management Development 36

Johanna Rothman

MARCH 18, 2024

That part discusses why managers see agile coaches and Scrum Masters as staff positions, not line jobs. I assume you have some sort of functional product development expertise. If not, why are you in technical product development? This post is about your deep domain expertise, first in product, then in agility.

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Agile How To Metrics Productivity 81

Johanna Rothman

OCTOBER 12, 2020

Once the team completes that highest priority feature(s), the team can release the product. When we release, we can regroup and figure out what to do next for this product. Fork another product. (I I did this with several Lite vs Pro products using this approach.). Opportunities for More Agility.

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Johanna Rothman

JULY 22, 2021

Worse, many of these managers also want business agility. Business agility requires change. Product strategy, to define the value the products offer to the product's users/customers. In addition, you might need these product strategies too: Product architecture, to shepherd the technical value of a product.

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Productivity Strategy Strategy Strategy& 133

Johanna Rothman

OCTOBER 27, 2020

Maybe you want to use this project as a way to integrate a team into a new product or a new domain. Here's an example: you solved this problem in a previous patch, and now it's time to port that solution to the main. Solving Deterministic Problems Does Not Require an Agile Approach. You'd like to experiment. Management feedback.

Agile 101

Agile Culture Productivity Management 101

Johanna Rothman

MARCH 14, 2024

And even if you can find an agile coaching or Scrum Master job, the pay is so terrible, you don’t want to take it. That’s because these managers think agile coaching and Scrum Mastering is a staff job, not a line job. At what level do you understand the products you’ve worked on? Those are functional skills.

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Agile How To Metrics Productivity 100

Johanna Rothman

OCTOBER 20, 2020

The original signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development wanted to solve these specific problems: How can we: Bring more adaptability to software development? For example (books have affiliate Amazon links): Takeuchi and Nonaka published The New New Product Development Game in HBR in 1986. Womack and Daniel T.

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Agile Software Productivity Culture 66

Johanna Rothman

OCTOBER 20, 2020

I discussed the origins of the agile approaches in Part 5. In this post, I'll discuss how you can create an agile approach that fits your context. Why should you create your own agile approach? Because your context is unique to you, your team, project, product, and culture. Remember, an agile approach starts with a team.

Agile 60

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Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 12, 2019

I spoke at Agile 2019 last week. Here are my thoughts and where I think the “agile” industry is headed. Problems I See with “Agile” Here's a summary of problems I saw last week: Too many people think “agile” will solve all their problems. Do You Need an Agile Approach?

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Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

For years, managers have been trying to find ways to make software product development faster and easier. I think of spreadsheets as an unintentional, but prime example of this. “Agile” as a way to do much more work in much less time. (NO! AI to take the place of humans in product development.

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Agile Tools Productivity Development 82

Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 14, 2020

They've started to use agile approaches. Capitalization for Agile Work. Let me walk you through an example of a 5-person agile team. Let's assume everyone works together, on one project (product, if you prefer). See Minimum Product Outcomes for more details.). They no longer have all waterfall projects.

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Software Agile Finance Productivity 74

Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

A colleague, Tom, told me about this question he received in an interview: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. The product owner is not part of the team. Too many varied tasks might mean the product owner treats the team as if it's a feature factory. More below.)

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Productivity Agile Interviews Report 75

Johanna Rothman

MAY 3, 2019

I started this series discussing the issue of the various product-based roles in an agile organization. I suggested a product value team because one person becomes a bottleneck. One person is unlikely to shepherd the strategy and the tactics for a product. Can Your Customer Be Your Product Owner? Think small.).

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Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Or, the product owner thinks you can do more. Agile approaches are not about doing more. Agile approaches encourage us to do the least we need to do, to the best of our abilities, to get feedback, so we can do it again. See Agile Transformation: Practice Change, Part 2 for an example.). Here's an example.

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Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 21, 2019

I started asking if you actually need an agile approach in Part 1 and noted the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers in an agile transformation. Part 4 was about how “Agile” is meaningless and “agile” is an adjective that needs to be applied to something. That would be resilient.

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Johanna Rothman

APRIL 8, 2019

In an ideal agile world, the team would work directly with a customer. When you have a small product that serves maybe three types of customer (new, expert, admin for example), and that customer is down the figurative hall, you might not need any product people. Let's talk about why we have any product people at all.

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Productivity Agile Strategy Strategy 60

Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

In How Product Goals Make it Easier to Create Sprint Goals and Reduce Feature Factories, Part 1 , I started responding to Tom's interview question. Here's the question again: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. ” All agile approaches limit WIP (Work in Progress).

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Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 14, 2019

In Part 1 , I wrote about how “Agile” is not a silver bullet and is not right for every team and every product. This post is about how management fits into agile approaches. Too often, managers think “agile” is for others, specifically teams of people. Team-based “agile” is not enough.

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Business Consulting Agency

JANUARY 30, 2024

This article explores how consulting services contribute to the success of startups, small businesses, and larger enterprises, supported by facts, statistics, and real-world examples. Real-world Example: A tech startup struggling with scalability engaged a business consultant to optimize its operations.

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Consulting Enterprise Small Business Agile 83

Johanna Rothman

MAY 11, 2022

Finishing a story creates a new decision point, for both the product and the corporate strategy. The more often we iterate strategically, the more we exhibit business agility. Here's an example. The product owner asks the team to finish 5 stories in this iteration. If you want business agility, deliver often.

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Strategy Strategy Strategy& Agile 96

Tom Spencer

JUNE 9, 2023

These systems can suggest relevant products that customers are likely to enjoy. For example, Alibaba, a leading Chinese e-commerce company, could conduct sentiment analysis of customer reviews of individual products and services, and use these insights to modify existing products and develop new ones.

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Johanna Rothman

APRIL 11, 2019

An agile approach requires a cross-functional team. That intent might be an entire product. That cross-functional team is a product team or a feature team. I tend to call them feature teams because they might move from feature set to feature set when they work as part of a program or over time as the product evolves.

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Productivity Agile Development Efficiency 64

Epicflow

MARCH 19, 2024

This time, we’ve prepared updates that will prove useful for those who work in an Agile environment, use Jira + Epicflow integration as well as those dealing with manufacturing, machine building, and other complex phased projects. back-end and front-end developers, QA engineers, etc.).

Management 52

Management Agile Engineering Software 52

Johanna Rothman

JULY 20, 2021

We talk a lot about empowered or self-organizing teams in the agile community. When Mark Kilby and I wrote From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams , we said the easiest way to create a system that worked for the team was for the team to create its own board. Agile Approaches Require Management Cultural Change.

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Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

As a consultant, I create many kinds of information products: both writing and speaking. That allows me the most flexibility in my product development. However, too many organizations don't differentiate between what they need to ship as experiments and when to finalize the product. The product is done, done, done.

Software 87

Software Productivity Agile Development 87

Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 31, 2022

I don't have just one product for my business. And I'm not a team working on just one feature set or a product. However, when I switched to continuous flow, I have a different approach to my planning and sizing of my work: I have a yearly strategy with the answers to who I serve with which products and services. What happened?

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Productivity Development Video Management 117

Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

If you took an agile workshop sometime in the past 15 years, you probably played the “ ball game.” Especially since they've probably suffered through way too many “agile” workshops with more and more games. That's an example of how insidious resource efficiency thinking is. Why do I have to play a game?”

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Johanna Rothman

MARCH 30, 2018

One of my clients has many reasons for wanting an agile transformation. Their old products are at the end of their lives. They need agile approaches so they can get feedback from customers as they develop the new products. Agile approaches are perfect for their corporate needs. Their agile transformation is stuck.

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Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 28, 2023

I used the example of my lunch: I know I will eat lunch. In Part 2 , I suggested the product leader/team/some combination, have a conversation to understand the context for the request. The longer the backlog, the less agile you can be, because no one's incorporating learning into the work. See Do You Have Feature-Itis?

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Johanna Rothman

DECEMBER 5, 2019

The more component teams they have, the more complexity they create in the teams, in the product, and in delivery. No one can tell anything about project or product progress. This image (from Agile and Lean Program Management ) shows how a program manager might think of the architecture for an integrated system product.

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Johanna Rothman

MAY 24, 2018

As their organizations move to agile approaches, these managers have problems: their organization (managers above them) wants to measure them by the old rules which demand control. ” Too often, managers feel this tension because the agile approaches challenge the organizational culture. Ask for the results the manager wants.

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Johanna Rothman

MAY 31, 2023

Instead, think of a book as a product. Products have user journeys. Here are some examples, using my books: Successful Independent Consulting has one ideal reader: the solo entrepreneur as a consultant. In contrast, the ideal reader for Agile and Lean Program Management is a cross-functional/cross-organizational leader. (See

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Education Agile How To Productivity 97

Harvard Business

MAY 15, 2018

Increasing volatility, uncertainty, growing complexity, and ambiguous information (VUCA) has created a business environment in which agile collaboration is more critical than ever. Intuitively, we know that the collaborative intensity of work has skyrocketed, and that collaborations are central to agility. This story is not unique.

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Tom Spencer

MAY 5, 2023

This article will consider three examples from military history that can examined to better understand competitive strategy in the business arena. As they gradually improve the quality of their product offering, the new entrant has the potential to take over the entire market.

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Strategy Strategy Strategy& Agile 88

Johanna Rothman

FEBRUARY 27, 2018

” is one of the questions I see when I work with people going through an agile transformation. I like to see the questions reflect the why for your organization’s agile transformation. A simplistic qualitative measure of organizational agility). “What should I measure???” What do we want less of?

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Johanna Rothman

SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Even if a 5 to 7-person team falls into the Everyone Starts Their Own Story trap (see Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games? or Create Your Successful Agile Project ), the team can still know what's going on. Then, I watched Drunk Agile Episode 75: Team Size. For example: Does this team need to integrate with support?

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