Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects (Pragmatic Programmers) [Paperback]

Johanna Rothman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 26, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1934356298 | ISBN-13: 978-1934356296 | Edition: 1

All of your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend responding to emergencies?

This book will introduce you to different ways of ordering all of the projects you are working on now, and help you figure out how to staff those projects--even when you've run out of project teams to do the work.

Once you learn to manage your portfolio better, you'll avoid emergency "firedrills." The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they are software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers.

You may be accustomed to spending time in meetings where you still don't have the data you need to evaluate your projects. Here, with a few measures, you'll be able to quickly evaluate each project and come to a decision quickly.

You'll learn how to define your team's, group's, or department's mission with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you can make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Johanna Rothman helps leaders solve problems and seize opportunities. She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management. Johanna publishes The Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter and podcast, and writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of several books: - Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management - Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby) - Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People - Corrective Action for the Software Industry (with Denise Robitaille).

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1 edition (August 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934356298
• ISBN-13: 978-1934356296
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #165,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Here's my formal bio:

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. During her consulting career, she has assisted managers, teams, and organizations become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management. She's helped Engineering organizations, IT organizations, and startups hire technical people, manage projects, and release successful products faster. Her action-based assessment reports have helped managers and teams improve their projects, products, and financial results. She is a sought-after speaker and teacher in the areas of project management, people management, and problem-solving.

Johanna has written over 100 articles and papers, maintains two blogs, and is a frequent contributor for Fast Company's online career center, Software Development, Computerworld.com, and StickyMinds.com. Johanna is a coauthor (with Esther Derby) of Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds, and is a coauthor(with Denise Robitaille) of Corrective Action for the Software Industry. Johanna is also a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference.

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I care about projects that work, teams that work, and organizations that work.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Project Portfolio Management goes Agile, September 4, 2009

By 

Claude Emond (Montreal, Qc, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

Part of my work involves coaching organisations in implementing and improving their portfolio management processes. I religiously buy and read most of what is published on the subject in English or French. More than often, I had to conclude that this book or article I just read, I could have written myself... and done then only a half-job doing so. Most of the literature on the subject, I have seen up to now, talked a lot about mathematical scoring models, tools and techniques, addressing mostly the mechanics of the process. It never addressed the soul of the process, the Humans, and how to deal with the main challenge of portfolio management in this area, namely: "How do we get a whole organisation to live a common vision and be truly aligned and willing to make it happen through project work". Most of the books, that have been published, focus on best practices and techniques and do not discuss behavioural aspects as a key issue.....up to now!

"Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects" is Johanna Rothman's third book. Her first two, "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management" and "Manage It: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management" are real gems and won prices for their quality and usefulness. I do not hesitate to say that "Manage It" is one of the best books around for giving practical advice to project managers. Her last book, as her two others, is full of real life examples and little case studies that supports the principles, concepts and techniques offered. "Manage Your Project Portfolio" is really a very complete "How-to" book on how to set up and manage your project portfolio. This book addresses human aspects very well, including a very nice chapter dedicated to collaboration work in a portfolio management context (chapter 6). The chapter on metrics and measurement is also straight to the point (Chapter 10). Ms Rothman's top-notch practical advices and examples are found all over the place up to the last page, with a great last chapter titled "Start Somewhere...But Start", one of the best things to do when it is time to go forward with taking charge of your portfolio of projects.

I do believe this book gives a more complete view of what is at stake when dealing with project portfolio management and will really help organisations to move forward faster with implementing and improving this key business issue of the 21st century, the Project Age. A very inspiring book!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A welcome addition to the agile body of knowledge, December 6, 2010

By 

J. Rasmusson (Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

Managing a single project is easy.
Managing multiple projects is hard.

Yet this is the state most companies find them in. They've had success with agile at the individual project level, and now they are looking guidance on how to manage and track multiple agile projects in one complete portfolio.

Fortunately for us, Johanna Rothman gives us some valuable advice on exactly how to do that in Manage Your Project Portfolio - Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects.

Chalked full of great war stories and advice, Manage Your Project Portfolio shows you how to:

* Create a portfolio for your projects.
* How to rank, prioritize, and evaluate which ones you should be doing.
* How to socialize and collaborate on what you are delivering.
* As well has how to iterate and make decisions at the portfolio level (instead of always down at the project level).

I really like some of the sidebars and stories Johanna has collected. Johanna reminds us that:

Two part time people do not make one full-time equivalent.
Sometimes killing a project is the best thing you can do.
And my personal favorite - fund projects incrementally instead of all at once.

If you are looking for advice around what to measure when tracking your projects, how to come up with an actionable mission statement, or just how to effectively communicate the state of your portfolio ask Santa for a copy of Manage Your Project Portfolio. It could be exactly what your company is looking for going into the New Year.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creating and using a project portfolio effectively, February 7, 2010

By 

Erik Gfesser (Lombard, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

Rothman's latest effort is all about how to create and use a project portfolio effectively. Note that while the author discusses how a collection of projects might together form real value, a program, this is not the focus of this book. After discussing project portfolio basics, the author discusses project evaluation, portfolio ranking, portfolio collaboration, portfolio iterations, portfolio decisions, portfolio evolution, and ends by addressing mission. This book was composed very well, and this reviewer especially found valuable the manner in which the author points to prerequisite areas of the book by page throughout in case the reader does not read sequentially. As Rothman indicates, a project portfolio is simply the organization of projects, by date and value, to which the associated organization commits or is planning to commit. A project portfolio helps the practitioner decide when to commit to a project so that a product development team can start or continue a project, understand when it is time to terminate a project so that a team might be freed for other work, determine when to transform a project and commit to the resultant project, and serve as a visual tool to help enable negotiation on how to tackle projects when it is difficult to decide what to do next.

The author points out that "if everyone in your organization (senior managers, middle managers, technical leads, functional managers, and project managers) is wedded to a serial life cycle and no one is willing to consider finishing valuable chunks of work frequently, you can't use a pragmatic approach to managing the project portfolio". In addition, "when your organization's management refuses to make a project portfolio, that lack of decision making is guaranteeing at least one or more schedule games. Or, people will decide which project to work on first, and that decision may not agree with yours. Without project portfolio management, you have more projects competing for the same - and limited - number of people. You find you can't commit to which people work on projects when, you're awash in emergency projects, and you and your staff are running yourselves ragged multitasking" which research has consistently shown to be unproductive. While "Manage Your Project Portfolio" is not a technical text by any means and is expected to be an easy read for most audiences, the author did decide to include a couple of very effective diagrams in the second chapter that if understood by the reader will help navigate the rest of the text by understanding what a project portfolio does for the organization, and what happens when no one manages the project portfolio.

In addition to providing new material, Rothman effectively ties in the insights of a number of other authors in this space, and this reviewer especially enjoyed seeing multiple references to Frederick P. Brooks and Gerald M. Weinberg. The manner in which the author incorporates agile philosophies is especially well done. Her discussion on velocity, both individual and team, for example, is quite effective. "Since I've been working in the field, my managers and clients have been trying to measure productivity. What a waste. Individual productivity means nothing. What does mean something is a team's throughput." While many readers might have already come to the same conclusion, Rothman really drives home this point. "If you try to measure individual productivity, you will get some data. And, the people whom you are measuring will game the data, have no fear. If you measure code, they'll write a ton. If you measure tests, they'll write a bazillion. If you measure files, they will have many more than the project needs. No matter what you measure, if it's not running, tested features, then they will game the system. Don't do it. But you say, I have several single-person projects. Surely I can measure that person's productivity. Um, no, you can't. First, I doubt that those people resist talking to each other. Second, how will you compare productivity? If Davey gets the easy projects and Sally gets the hard ones, who is more productive? I can't tell, and neither can you. Stop trying."