Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Use Cycle Time and Value Stream Maps to Visualize Delays and Predict Better
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.
Fiona, an agile project manager, accepted an assignment to “turn around a team that’s not delivering.” She suspects there’s more to the story than a lack of delivery. She meets with the team members as a team, and one on one. She discovers these problems:
- The current product owner is spread so thin that he can only spend a day every other week with this team.
- The team hasn’t done a demo in months. It doesn’t know who to demo to and what the outcome of that demo would be.
- Each person reports to a different manager. Those managers pressure each person to increase their “personal” velocity.
- The team stopped doing retrospectives a couple of months ago, too.
- The company needs this team to deliver finished functionality and wants to know when it can expect that functionality. So far, all the estimates the team offered have been wrong.
What could Fiona do?
She decided to understand the estimation problem first. If the team could deliver finished functionality—even if that delivery was one small bit at a time—she could relieve the pressure on the team.
Understand the Estimation Problems
Up until now, the team used story points to predict how long its work would take. Back when it estimated the team’s story points, that worked okay. However, because the managers pushed…
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"All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income." - Samuel Butler |