Managing Product Development

I wrote a little article about Barriers to Agility in the most recent version of PragPub, the online magazine from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. There’s a bunch of other good articles in there, too. Andy Lester has a great article about speaking as a way to practice interviewing, a bunch of comments/thoughts/rants about the iPad, and much more. Take a look!

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I am very fortunate. I had Daniel Steinberg as my editor for Manage It! and for Manage Your Project Portfolio. We’ve learned how to work together well, and we enjoy working with each other. (Well, I *love* working with him :-)  I suspect know sometimes I’m a huge pain.) We’d never met, and this past weeekend, we did.

Daniel and Johanna meet in person

As you can tell from my wide smile, I was pretty psyched.

Hey Daniel, lunch and visiting was great.

And for those of you waiting for Manage Your Project Portfolio, any day now…

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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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Merlin, via 43 Folders Clips has a video of Eric Idle, on John Cleese’s Approach to Writing. Aside from John Cleese’s specificity, Idle talks about how he had trouble finding collaborators until he started working with John Dupre (I don’t know how his name is spelled).

Collaborating with other writers for natural language writing is difficult. I find pairing for code much easier, and even for code, I have trouble. No one can read my mind, I want to name variables something else. I want a different setup. There’s always something.

If you find some good collaborators, treasure your relationship with them.

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I’ve been steadily writing the project portfolio management book this summer, and was describing what I do to Steve Freeman someone today. (I’m at the Agile 2008 conference.) I explained that I had a list of things I thought should be in a chapter, but it wasn’t a real outline the way other people outline. He replied, “You have a backlog for each chapter.”

Of course, that makes sense. I write those pieces. Sometimes they stay in the chapter in which I originally thought they went, sometimes they have to move. Sometimes they go to the chapter that’s called “stuff to put somewhere.” (Which might be nowhere for this book.)

I’m not good about outlining. I am good at seeing a bunch of related ideas and sometimes I’m good at weaving them together. But I don’t always see the organizing theme (which is where Daniel, my editor, is a huge help). Without the organizing theme, I don’t always have the backlog in the right place. But I do like thinking about those bullets at the beginning of the chapter as a backlog.

Having a chapter backlog is a useful metaphor for me, because it helps me keep my eye on the theme (iteration goal), and not try to do more than that for a particular chapter.

Now, if I can just remember who said this to me today :-)

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Dwayne’s comment on my post, Architecting from the Features, made me realize I hadn’t provided an example of how I’d changed the book. Head slap on me! One of my rules of writing, which I use when I’m revising because I rarely remember as I’m writing the first draft, is to explain what I’m writing with an example. Examples can be a “for instance”, a story, an anecdotes–anything that connects my writing to the reader. Some people like stories first. Some like the idea first. But both of those kinds of readers will stay with your writing if they know you’ll get to the other part sometime soon.

So here’s the before an after table of contents for the project portfolio management book. I fully expect the chapter titles and contents to change.

I’ve got the notions of the reader’s span of control in “Making Great Portfolio Decisions” rather than in separate chapters, which is making it easier for me to write that and the other chapters.

Dwayne, thanks for asking for an example.

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I’m writing the portfolio management book, and I just finished a whole big re-architecture. I’m so excited.

I realize most people aren’t that excited about a rearchitecture :-), especially not of a book in progress. But I am, because I took my own advice.

When I started writing the book, I had several partly done chapter-things. They were not particularly well-written, nor were they coherent and several pieces were tightly coupled. But they were enough for the Prags to see what I was thinking. Luckily, that was enough for a contract.

I’ve been writing off and on since I got the contract, and have been getting stuck. I realized last week it was time to print the book and start cutting pieces of it to reorganize.

I finally started making the book (yes, I write in markup language, check my writing into Subversion, and use make to make the book), and seeing it on paper helped me see where my features were.

I have some user stories:

• “As a first level manager or technical lead, I want to see how to make a portfolio.”
• “As a middle manager, I want to see how to make a portfolio and make decisions about it.”
• “As a senior manager, I want to review the portfolio, and make decisions about it based on data.”

But being your own product owner is not such a good idea. Because I thought the roles were driving the book, I had separated a bunch of the writing by role first, and then what the roles did. But it turns out, that for this book, right now, the portfolio activities are what needs to drive the book. Maybe that’s obvious to you. But it wasn’t for me.

I realize the current book’s architecture may not last. But I can see how to write more of it. And, I’ve been refactoring to clean up my writing. I think of the refactoring as where I put things to make the book clearer, and editing as how I change the words to make the ideas clearer.

I wrote several features–actually parts of several features because I got stuck. Now I’ve rearchitected and the writing is flowing. I’m probably not done rearchitecting, but that’s ok. I have a place to head towards now. Onward!

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I was under the weather last week, and am finally well enough to think. I still have the raspy voice from coughing all week, but you can’t hear me. Since I worked out this morning, my brain is actually firing on all cylinders.

I signed a contract with Pragmatic Bookshelf for my next book about project portfolio management. This time, they wanted a schedule. I know I write in fits and spurts, so I was stumped. But I decided to take my own advice. I have a plan to timebox the writing in chunks, and I gave myself quarterly goals of a certain number of pages. Writing that number of pages isn’t a problem–writing that number of good pages might be a problem. I’ll be trying things out on you, I’m sure.

If you’re not sure the world needs a book on project portfolio management, take a look at Raven’s Project Management Cartoon from Project: Humor – Water Me. Sad, but too true.

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During the past few week, while editing Successful Project Management, I had an opportunity learned to discover other ways I weaken my writing.

I already knew about “get” and “put” and “do”–any words you can command a computer–are weak verbs. It’s ok to use them to start writing, but my writing is stronger when I change those verbs to describe what I really want. I’d changed “Get people” to “Acquire people.” Luckily, Esther reminded me we don’t acquire people in organizations; we recruit, attract, or hire them, but we don’t acquire them. (That’s why we have review :-)

I also knew about the “lullaby” words: “just” is my favorite.

But I hadn’t realized I was so enamored of “in order to,” “So,” or “Now.” I managed to find all the “in order to” and remove the “in order”. That helped me see what I really wanted to say. “Find a large wall in order to post your project dashboard” became “Find a large wall to post your project dashboard” which became “Post your project dashboard on a large wall.” (That’s an example, not a quote.) I started too many sentences with “So;” so I removed them all. (I might have 2 left, in dialogue.) Now, With those edits complete, I could attack the “now” removals. I used “now” as a way to sequence actions, without making a list.

I’m sure I have more strengthening to do can strengthen my writing more. The copyeditor is great, so I’ll have lots of ideas/fixes when the copyediting is complete.

Labels: Manage It, Successful Project Management, writing

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