Has Your Project Outgrown Its Training Wheels?
No matter what lifecycle or process your project uses, the participants on your project have some strongly-held beliefs. “The iteration must be two weeks long.” “No, the iteration must be three weeks long.” “You must ask these three questions at the standup.” “No, you must sit down at the standup.” “You must only measure velocity.” “No, you must only measure cumulative flow.” “You must never use waterfall.” “You must always use waterfall.”
How do you know the project management practices are working for you? When is it time to reexamine those beliefs? Such questions are hard. But, they are necessary to ask and answer, if you want to keep improving and keep innovating.
There are no best practices. There are practices that help projects. It’s good to know when your project or program has outgrown the practices it uses. In this session, we will seek the patterns that help us realize when a project has outgrown its training wheels.
About Johanna Rothman
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.
More About Johanna »