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

Inertia Is Bad: How to Generate Momentum in Your Agile Program

In a large agile project or program, you know how hard it can be to keep things moving. To prevent inertia from slowing an agile program, there's one simple objective you can assign everyone at the start of an iteration to help the team build momentum. Read on for great advice from Johanna Rothman.

Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program

If you keep a stream of features moving in a program—even with many feature teams—you are OK as long as the project teams keep talking to one another. You are not OK, however, if someone decides, “I own this code and no one else can touch it.” Johanna Rothman says how agile programs should operate.

Use Personal Kanban to Manage Your Job Hunt

Job hunting is a complex project, and one way to manage it is to use personal kanban to organize your search. Johanna Rothman gives suggestions about how to create your kanban to make it work best for you, where you put your to-do's and call-backs about job offers, and executing iterations.

Agile Is Not for Everyone (and That's OK)

Agile is not just a lifecycle, but also a huge cultural shift for the entire organization. In this article, Johanna Rothman details some of the issues that prevent teams from transitioning to agile and discusses what a team's options are if it decides agile is not the way to go.

We Have Created Our Own Shortage of People

If you are a hiring manager looking for people, don’t create your own shortage of candidates by insisting on too-tight job descriptions. Technical skills are helpful but not critical. Try training a candidate into a good fit for your position.

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