Speaker Topics - No Fluff Just Stuff
NFJS2025

Seven Principles for Any Effective Agile Team, Collocated or Distributed

Many agile teams—distributed or collocated—practice cargo cult agile instead of realizing the freedom and ease an agile approach can actually supply. That’s because they don’t realize there are seven principles they can apply. Applying them isn’t easy but is possible. In this workshop, we'll walk through the seven principles and you'll create your action items for what you can do when you return to the office.

The seven principles:

  • Create transparency at all levels.
  • Create a culture of continuous improvement with experiments.
  • Practice pervasive communication at all levels.
  • Create a project rhythm.
  • Assume good intention.
  • Create a culture of resilience.
  • Default to collaborative work, not solo work.

This workshop will not address the first principle in the book: Establish Acceptable Hours of Overlap. That's a separate workshop all its own.


Johanna Rothman

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.

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