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How to Say 'No' the Agile Way
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.
I originally wanted to write about how to start an agile project, possibly the pilot agile project in your organization--if it was starved of resources, people, machines, space, whatever. But I can’t write that article because no advice is worth the space. You shouldn’t even start that project.
An important tenet of agile project management is that both the team and management fully commit to the project. It’s the same idea as when an agile team commits to backlog items for an iteration--it’s got to be a full commitment all around.
Let me be clear about what a starved project is: That’s a project where you’re busy counting the FTEs (Full Time Equivalent) because no one is assigned to this project full time. Or it’s a project with no testers. Or a project with no database people (even though the database is an integral part of the project). Or it’s a project with no testbed, even though you can’t move the product directly to production; you have to test it first. That’s a starved project. Most of the time, I see projects starved of people because they are “just finishing up” a previous project.
Sometimes, I see projects starved of project management time because the project manager is supposed to be managing several projects at once. Well, that doesn’t work for any project--and it definitely doesn&…
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