Johanna Rothman

Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

You have too many projects, and firefighting and multitasking are keeping you from finishing any of them. You need to manage your project portfolio. This fully updated and expanded bestseller arms you with agile and lean ways to collect all your work and decide which projects you should do first, second, and never. See how to tie your work to your organization's mission and show your managers, your board, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. Picture the work you have, and make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be.

All your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time do you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend on emergency fire drills or waste through multitasking? This book gives you insightful ways to rank all the projects you're working on and figure out the right staffing and schedule so projects get finished faster.

The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they're software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers. Find out how to define the mission of your team, group, or department, with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you'll manage your portfolio better and make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization.

With this expanded second edition, discover how to scale project portfolio management from one team to the entire enterprise, and integrate Cost of Delay when ranking projects. Additional Kanban views provide even more ways to visualize your portfolio.

Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in Your Project Portfolio

Does your organization value and rank projects based on estimation? Except for the shortest projects, estimation is often wrong. You don’t realize the value you planned when you wanted. How can you finish projects in time to realize their potential value? Instead of estimation, consider using cost of delay to evaluate and rank projects. Cost of delay accounts for ways projects get stuck: multitasking, other projects not releasing on time, work queuing behind experts, excessive attention to code cleanliness, and management indecision to name several. Once you know about cost of delay, you can decide what to do about it. You can stop the multitasking. You can eliminate the need for experts. You can reduce the number of projects and features in progress. You can use cost of delay to rank projects and work in your organization. Learn to use cost of delay to make better decisions for your project, program, or project portfolio.

Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization

If you’re trying to use agile and lean at the program level, you’ve heard of several approaches, all about scaling processes. If you duplicate what one team does for several teams, you get bloat, not delivery. Instead of scaling the process, scale everyone's collaboration.

With autonomy, collaboration, and exploration, teams and program level people can decide how to apply agile and lean to their work.

Learn to collaborate around deliverables, not meetings. Learn which measurements to use and how to use those measures to help people deliver more of what you want (value) and less of what you don’t want (work in progress). Create an environment of servant leadership and small-world networks. Learn to enable autonomy, collaboration, and exploration across the organization and deliver your product.

Scale collaboration with agile and lean program management and deliver your product.

Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule

You’d like to estimate your project’s cost or schedule accurately. So far, none of your approaches have worked. It’s time to consider how you can create an accurate estimate. You might not be able to develop an estimate at the beginning of a project that is good until the end. Few project teams can. Instead, learn a number of ways to see your project and how to address your uncertainties in ways your managers will accept.

Hiring Geeks That Fit

Hiring a person for your team is the single most important decision you can make. It has long-lasting impact, whether you are the manager or a team member. Would you like to learn to hire great people? Not surehow? You need this book.


Great geeks are not the same as skill-based staff. You need to analyze your culture, determine your problems, define the essentials you need in a candidate, and then you're off and running.


Great geeks adapt their knowledge to your context. One developer or technical manager is not interchangeable with another. Hiring Geeks That Fit takes the guesswork and cost out of hiring.

Manage Your Job Search

Are you a technical person, such as a software developer, tester, writer, or project manager? You know that a job search is tough. You have to network, online and in person. You have to customize your resume for each job, so you can showcase your talent. You have to look for a culture that fits you. How do you start?



Treat your job hunt like the project it is. Use agile and lean project management approaches that allow you to create a visual system.



You’ll increase your productivity, track your progress, evaluate your work, gain feedback, and throw out what doesn’t work while building on your successes. Learn from your past career to optimize for your next step. Full of tips, stories, and humor, you’ll apply practical techniques to take control of the most important project you’ll ever work on: find your next best job.

Corrective Action for the Software Industry

Many people are confused about corrective action. They know it's a requirement for compliance to standards such as ISO 9001. In some cases, the mandate is imposed by customers or regulatory agencies. Compounding this misunderstanding is that much of what has been written about the corrective action process is targeted toward manufacturing organizations, with the predictable references to tooling, production equipment, inspection of materials, storage issues, component design and the like. For software organizations, the product is intangible, and the processes may be electronically defined, derived, and controlled. Corrective action and the manner in which it is implemented needs to be explained specifically for software, both in language and supporting documentation.

This practical handbook discusses the hows and whys of corrective action, with a particular focus on its application in software environments. It also illustrates how the process is integrated into the various other functions of the organization.

Denise Robitaille is the author of numerous books on various quality topics. She is an internationally recognized speaker who brings years of experience in business and industry to her work in the quality profession. Denise is a member of U.S. TAG to ISO/TC 176, the committee responsible for updating the ISO 9000 family of standards. She is also a RABQSA certified lead assessor, an ASQ Certified Quality Auditor, and a senior member of ASQ.

Denise’s books include:The Corrective Action Handbook, The Management Review Handbook, The Preventive Action Handbook, Root Cause Analysis: Basic Tools and Techniques, Document Control and Managing Supplier-Related Processes. She is a regular columnist for The Auditor newsletter and is the author of numerous articles.

Johanna Rothman helps managers, teams, and organizations become more effective with her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management. Rothman is a frequent speaker and author on managing high-technology product development and has written more than 100 articles and papers. She is a columnist for Software Development, Computerworld.com, and StickyMinds.com. She also publishes Reflections, an acclaimed quarterly newsletter about managing product development.

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