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

Coach New Project Team Members to Succeed

Managers need to conduct one-on-ones, and it's especially important with new people. Managers might not need to perform the on-the-job coaching, but they need to make sure the coaching gets done by someone. Otherwise, new hires are not going to perform at the levels they should—or could.

Working Your Way Out of Large Technical Debt in a Small Project

When you transition to agile with a small project and you have a reasonably sized codebase, chances are quite good that you’ve been working on the product for a while. You have legacy code—and that code comes with technical debt. Johanna Rothman has ideas about how to work yourself out of it.

Which Delivery Option Is Right for Your New Agile Program?

With agile, you have delivery model options you didn’t have before. You can do continuous deployment or phased deployment, or stick with a traditional rollout. There is no hands-down best model. What you choose should depend on what your team and your customers need. Here's how to figure that out.

When Managing Multiple Teams, Think Networks—Not Hierarchies

The more complex your program, the harder it is to communicate. But contrary to some management styles, the larger your program, the less you want a hierarchy. It's better to assemble networks of people equally responsible for their problems. Read on for tips on how to organize for multiple teams.

Four Steps to Managing Programs with Agile and Traditional Projects

You are a program manager with some agile projects and some traditional projects in the midst of an agile transition. How do you manage the program? You have to help the traditional project managers work in some new and different ways. Here are four steps to help the adjustment go more smoothly.

Making Telecommuting Work for Your Product Development Team

Can you make telecommuting work for your organization? Of course you can. The question is this: Will it make your product development proceed faster, with more ease and less cost, and allow you the most flexibility? If not, you may want to reconsider having employees telecommute.

Meet These Preconditions Before You Think about Project Estimations

When estimating a project's release or budget, you can have only one number-one priority. If management has not thought about the constraints, they may be asking employees to cram in too many features with insufficient time. Read on for some conditions and guidelines about estimating for a project.

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