Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” provides frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams see problems and resolve risks and manage their product development.

She was the agileconnection.com technical editor for six years. Johanna is the author of these books:

From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver (with Mark Kilby)
Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
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)

Read her blog and other articles on her site, jrothman.com. She also writes a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.

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All Stories by Johanna Rothman

What’s Your “Size” of Agile?

There are approaches to agile that sound great on paper, but will they really be the best choice for your team in practice? Instead of standardizing on any form of agile, think about the results you want. Why not create the environment that works best for you? There's more than one way to do agile.

Who’s the Boss? Let Agile Teams Manage Themselves

This idea of a team in charge of itself is difficult for many people to accept. Traditional practices condition us to wait for someone to tell us what to do, and managers are accustomed to controlling everyone’s work and knowing everyone’s status. But agile teams can manage themselves—in fact, it's essential to agile.

An Agile Mindset: Learning Early, Not Failing Fast

Agile encourages teams to continuously improve through learning. One of the phrases associated with this process is "failing fast"—trying new things and taking lessons from mistakes as you go. But Johanna Rothman thinks "learning early" is a better phrase. That change in terminology can give you a happier mindset.

Creating Your Organization’s Agile Culture

Some organizations decide they can just “install” agile by simply telling the technical team members what to do. It never occurred to the managers that much of what makes agile successful is the organizational culture. It's important to recognize that agile is something you work toward—with the whole team.

Are You Problem Solving When You Should Try Problem Managing?

Usually in our projects, our goal is problem-solving. We find the root cause of a problem and experiment until we eradicate it. But is solving always the right path? Sometimes, our problems are temporary and only require a patch. In those cases, problem managing is probably the better choice.

Know the “Why” behind Your Projects

Every project has its own unique reason for existence. We often work on projects to deliver some kind of return for our organizations. When you start a project, do you know what that return is? When we know the reasons behind our work, we can be more successful—knowing why can create success.

Shorten Your Feedback Loops to Build Better Software, Faster

When we have short feedback loops, we are still in the moment for that feature. We still have the context. The longer the feedback loop, the less likely we are to still have all the context for the feature because we are on to the next piece of work. How long are your feedback loops? Can you shorten them?

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