Too many projects? Want to organize them and evaluate them without getting buried under a mountain of statistics? This book will help you collect all your work, decide which projects you should do first, second—and never. You’ll see how to tie your work to your organization’s mission and show your board, your managers, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. You’ll get a better view of the work you have, and learn how to make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be.

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About this Book

  • 200 pages
  • Published:
  • Release: P2.0 (2011-04-11)
  • ISBN: 978-1-93435-629-6

All of your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time do you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend responding to emergencies?

This book will introduce you to different ways of ordering all of the projects you are working on now, and help you figure out how to staff those projects—-even when you’ve run out of project teams to do the work.

Once you learn to manage your portfolio better, you’ll avoid emergency “firedrills”. The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they are software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers.

You may be accustomed to spending time in meetings where you still don’t have the data you need to evaluate your projects. Here, with a few measures, you’ll be able to quickly evaluate each project and come to a decision quickly.

You’ll learn how to define your team’s, group’s, or department’s mission with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you can make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization.

Contents and Extracts

Table of Contents

  • Foreword by Ron Jeffries
  • Foreword by Tim Lister
  • Preface
  • Meet Your Project Portfolio
  • See Your Future
  • Create Your First Draft Portfolio
  • Evaluate Your Projects excerpt
  • Rank the Portfolio
  • Collaborate on the Portfolio
  • Iterate on the Portfolio
  • Make Portfolio Decisions
  • Evolve Your Portfolio
  • Measure the Essentials
  • Define Your Mission
  • Start Somewhere … But Start

About the Author

Johanna Rothman helps leaders solve problems and seize opportunities. She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management.

Johanna publishes The Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter and podcast, and writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of several books: - Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management - Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby) - Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People - Corrective Action for the Software Industry (with Denise Robitaille).

Upcoming Author Events

  • 2013-04-21: Johanna Rothman
    5.5 days of leadership training for people who want to learn to be problem solving leaders. (Problem Solving Leadership Workshop, Albuquerque, NM)
  • 2013-05-16: Johanna Rothman
    Starting (or Restarting) Your Agile Project Right! Join us if you need to define where your project is headed and what done means. Discount for both workshops. (London, UK)
  • 2013-05-17: Johanna Rothman
    Master Class: Coaching for Leaders. Are you using all possible coaching stances? Explore with a master coach. Discount for both workshops. (London, UK)
  • 2013-05-20: Johanna Rothman
    Tutorial: Hiring for Your Team: Culture Trumps Skills (Let's Test Conference, Sweden)
  • 2013-05-21: Johanna Rothman
    Keynote: Becoming a Kick-Ass Test Manager (Let's Test Conference, Sweden)
  • 2013-06-06: Johanna Rothman
    Exploding Management Myths: Johanna will explain the management myths and what to do instead. She'll tackle favorites such as 100% utilization, no time for training, promoting the best technical person and more. (Agile Development Conference/Better Software, Las Vegas)

Comments and Reviews

  • California Bookwatch said:

    [This book is] a strong pick for any business interested in organizing and prioritizing projects. It shows how to tie work to an organization’s mission, get a better view of workflow options and priority scheduling, and make decisions based on better portfolio management. Any business library needs this.

    Midwest Book Review