Managing Product Development

Steve Berczuk has a lovely discussion of Manage Your Project Portfolio. You can see his review here.

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Erik Gfesser posted a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. Thanks, Erik!

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I’m slow to post this one: Giordano Scalzo’s lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio is up at Reviewing Manage Your Project Portfolio. I love the part where he says:

This book is a must read for everyone involved in IT world, from junior developer ’till C-level executive.
As usual, Johanna Rothman uses a very simple language and she provides a lot of exahustive examples so that everyone can understand the goals and the principles behind a project portfolio management.

Thank you, Giordano!

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See Claude Emond’s review of Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects. You have to register (free), and you can say “don’t email me anything” :-) Thanks, Claude!

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It’s a big week for me: Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects is shipping. In the approximately 24 hours I was home, I got to touch the first books.

When I proposed this book, I wanted it to be 175 pages: long enough to be useful, but not so long that managers wouldn’t read it. It’s about 180 pages of text, with references and an index bringing it up to 200 pages. I’m quite pleased that I hit my goal.

The table of contents:

1. Meet Your Project Portfolio
2. See Your Future
3. Create the First Draft of Your Portfolio
4. Evaluate Your Projects
5. Rank the Portfolio
6. Collaborate on the Portfolio
7. Iterate on the Portfolio
8. Make Portfolio Decisions
9. Evolve Your Portfolio
10. Measure the Essentials
11. Define Your Mission
12. Start Somewhere …But StartPlus a glossary of terms if you’re unfamiliar with agile and lean

If you have any of these problems, this book is for you:

• You or your staff are having trouble with multitasking
• You have many emergency projects
• It’s difficult for people to agree on goals or priorities or make strategic decisions
• You’d like to make decisions, but somehow, as a group, you don’t have the ability to do so

If you want to organize your projects and and evaluate them without getting buried under a mountain of statistics, this book is for you.�

Read part of the preface on my site, read the preface and part of the “Evaluate Your Projects” chapter on the publisher’s site. You can buy the book and the pdf (or some combination on the publisher’s site). You can buy just the book at Amazon.

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Manage Your Project Portfolio is at the printer. If the planets align, and the printer doesn’t run out of paper, and if Murphy stays away from this project, the books will start shipping the week of Aug 10. YIPPEEE!!!!! I’m just a little excited, can you tell??

Back in March, when the shipment seemed far away, I agreed to come out to PMI Silicon Valley and speak in the evening on Sept 2. I’m also talking with some folks about a talk Sept 3. That means I’m doing a book tour. Well, it is if you think two dates are a tour, and I do :-) If you are in the Bay Area, and you would like me to come speak to your organization, email me and we’ll talk.

BTW, I’ll fill in the urls when I know them.

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I’m in some variety of “final” editing on Manage Your Project Portfolio. I’ve reorganized the first chapter into two chapters, rewritten a bunch of things, added a new zero-sum game, and have managed to tighten up some of the writing. I’ve received great feedback from Esther, Don, and Dwayne that I’m still incorporating into my edits.

For me, the challenge in writing a book is to write it all down. I need to make sure I show why and how, and not forget the things I do that are so obvious to me but may not be to my reader. Once the book is ready for review, my initial editing challenge is to find ways to show the problems and solutions. But where I am now–close to final editing–my challenge is to not write any more words. Yes, I may have to write more words somewhere, but I have to manage the overall word count, or the book will not fit for its intended audience.

Jerry, in his writing workshops, and in Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method, taught me to cut by a third: cut a third of the words in a sentence, a third of the words in a paragraph, a third of the paragraphs, a third of the pages. I haven’t had to cut a third of the chapters–yet :-)

At the beginning of writing any piece, I allow and encourage expansion. Starting in the middle, after some initial review and towards the end, I work at trimming. (Sort of like life, right?) This looks a lot the way I used to write code too. I’m still writing when I edit, but my mindset is a little different.

For those of you who want to know when the book will be done: it depends on how much editing I finish this week, which also depends on when the hot water heater is fixed. Let’s hope the plumbers get here soon. Life is a little too challenging with no heat or hot water. I may have that story later this week.

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I’m in what might be close-to-final editing on Manage Your Project Portfolio. Not everyone understands all my references for things. For example, one of my reviewers did not know what a backlog is. Since I hope that managers of every level will read this book, it’s entirely possible they may not all know what a backlog is either. (Please don’t sneer at middle or senior managers who don’t know what a backlog is. They’ve used something like it, but if they are new to agile or new to project portfolio management, they may not have heard the word before.)

If you wanted to know the meaining of a word, would you prefer to see it as part of a glossary, or as part of an index? The index is easy. The glossary is not hard to include, either, it’s just a little more work. I want to do what my readers want to read. Please comment. Thank you.

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The project portfolio book is in Beta! For those of you who have not heard of a Pragmatic Bookshelf Beta book, here are the limitations:

• It’s not laid out correctly
• Although I’ve looked for typos, I have not discovered and fixed them all
• The bibliography is not yet included (it will be on later betas, but not this one)
• Not all the chapters are there (yes, I have drafts, but the drafts are not ready for beta)
• It could be wrong in places! (For example, Daniel pointed out to me the other day that I had defined double elimination incorrectly. Sigh.)

On the other hand, if you would like to see the book evolve, I invite you to participate in the beta. I already have errata which I will be fixing between the coughing and sneezing of my “vacation” cold.

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