Guerilla Agile: Adopting Agile Practices Even When Your Management is Still Playing Dysfunctional Waterfall Games

Johanna Rothman

Discovery Sessions · Leadership

Monday, 16:00, 1 hour 30 minutes | Meeting Room 10

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Chances are good that if you’ve worked on a project, you’ve encountered a schedule game or two (or three or four). As part of a team, you’ve seen Schedule Chicken or 90% Done. If you’re a project manager, you’ve probably pushed back against We Gotta Have it; We’re Toast Without It, the Queen of Denial, We’ll Go Faster Now, or Split Focus.

Using timeboxed iterations, a ranked product backlog, implementing by feature, tracking tested features, and other agile practices can help you avoid and stop playing schedule games. But you can’t do this alone. First help your team and your management understand they are playing schedule games. Then, once they understand the games, enlist their help in solving the underlying problems that lead to the games.

In this session, we’ll quickly walk through the schedule games, and then break into small groups based on which games are most often played at the attendees’ organizations. Each group will develop a plan to use agile practices to avoid the schedule games.

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of "Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management." She is the coauthor of the pragmatic "Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management," and author of the highly acclaimed "Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People." Johanna is a host of the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference.