Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
The Game of Risk
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
We are living in a time of economic uncertainty. For some people, that might mean a hunker-down, reduce-risk, stick-with-what-we-know mentality. I take a contrarian’s approach: Start the risky projects. If we don’t start the risky projects, how can we discover a breakthrough, reduce waste or innovate enough to work our way out of the uncertainty?
But don’t start the risky projects without a way to manage the risk. And don’t start projects that don’t fit with the corporation’s strategy at all. That means starting a project and looking to see what value it (and each other project) has delivered so far; and re-evaluating this project with respect to the other projects periodically underway.
Sounds good, right? There’s a catch. You can’t use a serial approach to the projects, and you have to look at the whole picture for the project portfolio. Welcome to agile and lean project portfolio management.
Deliver Value in Chunks
If you’re accustomed to managing a portfolio of waterfall or phase-gate projects using a serial lifecycle, you’re accustomed to seeing documentation as deliverables early in the project, code later in the project and finally finished features quite late in the project (if you’re lucky). But to start risky projects, you need to see features--as in running tested features…
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