Agile and Lean Program Management

by Johanna Rothman

Scaling process creates bloat. Dictating how to work to teams doesn’t work. What does? Servant leadership, autonomy, collaboration, and exploration. In this pragmatic and down-to-earth book, you’ll apply agile and lean principles to program management. If you’re a program manager, program product owner, or program architect, you’ll use servant leadership to enable the entire program’s success. If you’re part of a feature team, you’ll learn which measurements to provide to the program and what to expect of the program teams. You’ll use continuous planning, frequent deliverables, and agile and lean principles to deliver your product.

This work was written and produced entirely by the author. We are proud to be distributing it.

Scale collaboration, not process.

If you’re trying to use agile and lean strategies at the program level, you’ve heard of several approaches, all about scaling processes. If you duplicate what one team does for several teams, you get bloat, not delivery. Instead of scaling the process, scale everyone’s collaboration.

With autonomy, collaboration, and exploration, teams and program-level people can decide how to apply agile and lean principles to their own work. The feature teams build momentum, using whatever forms of agile or lean work for them. The program teams use lean inside a cadence to make sure the entire product is done and ready to release. The entire program uses empirical data to see and understand status.

Collaborate around deliverables, not meetings. Learn which measurements to use and how to use those measures to help people deliver more of what you want (value) and less of what you don’t want (work in progress). Create an environment of servant leadership and small-world networks. Enable autonomy, collaboration, and exploration across the organization, and deliver your product.

• Errata, typos, suggestions

Releases:

• P1.0 2016/03/22

• Praise Quotes
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Defining Agile and Lean Program Management
• 2. Consider Your Program Context *excerpt
• 3. Organize Your Program Teams
• 4. Start Your Program Right
• 5. Use Continuous Planning *excerpt
• 6. Create an Environment of Delivery
• 7. Encourage Autonomy, Collaboration, and Exploration
• 8. Conduct Useful Meetings for Your Program
• 9. Estimating Program Schedule or Cost
• 10. Useful Measurements in an Agile and Lean Program
• 11. Develop Your Servant Leadership
• 12. Shepherd the Agile Architecture *excerpt
• 13. Solve Program Problems
• 14. Integrating Hardware Into Your Program
• 15. Troubleshooting Agile Team Issues
• 16. Integrating Agile and Not-Agile Teams in Your Program
• 17. What to Do If Agile and Lean Are Not Right for You
• Annotated Bibliography
• Glossary
• More from Johanna

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She has helped managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to their issues of hiring, project management, risk management, and people management.

She’s the author of Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost, Manage Your Job Search, Hiring Geeks That Fit, Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management, and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management.