Johanna Rothman
New England Software Symposium
Boston · September 10 - 12, 2010
Speaker, Consultant, Author for managing product development
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.
With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:
- Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
- Become a Successful Independent Consultant
- Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
- Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
- Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
- From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
- Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
- Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
- Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
- Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.
Presentations
Agile and Lean Program Management: Collaborating Across the Organization
Agile or lean is working for you, on smaller projects. Now, you’ve got this big program. Will agile scale? Of course. Does it have to be in a big framework? Of course not.
When you scale agile to a program, you perform program management. You do not need Big Planning and huge teams. You need feature teams who work with autonomy, collaboration, and exploration. Add in autonomous program teams, and you have agile and lean program management.
Manage Your Project Portfolio: A Lean and Agile Approach
Feel as if you can't get anything done? More projects than time to do them? Crises out the wazoo? Then it's time to consider another approach: managing your project portfolio. You can organize your projects and and evaluate them without getting buried under a mountain of statistics.
Overcoming Several Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile
If you've been trying to change your organization so that your projects are more agile, you may have noticed several problems: it's difficult to have people such as product management, senior management, even functional managers work and manage in a way that makes sense for your agile project; you're working with other parts of a large program that isn't agile; you have a geographically distributed team; your management wants to know at the beginning when the project will end; or even that the project team does not share a common vision of what “done” means.
Successful Software Management: 17 Lessons Learned
Many software managers came to management through the technical ranks. Although they may have had plenty of technical training and mentoring, they frequently have to learn management skills the hard way, through trial and error. Johanna will describe some technical management tips and tricks learned through trial and error, focusing on software managers and their particular issues.
You'll learn about a manager's job, how to create an effective work environment, and how you can help people do their best work.