Rothman Johanna – Agile New England

Fight Fake Agility! How to Instill Real Agility in Any Team

John Vins — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 01:04:09 +0000

Does your work feel like an “agile death march”? If your team suffers from a years-long backlog, stand-ups consisting of individual status reports, and unrelenting multitasking, you’re probably using fake agility. Fake agility is a waterfall lifecycle masquerading as an agile approach. Unfortunately, it’s the norm in our industry.

But no one has to work that way. In this session you will learn how to use project and product risks to harness true agility in a way that works with your corporate culture.

About the Speaker
Johanna Rothman, the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank, practical advice that you can immediately apply to your product development challenges. She helps leaders and teams see their current reality and explore options for what and how to change. The results? Leaders and teams learn to collaborate and focus on outcomes that matter. Her clients and readers appreciate her trademark practicality and humor.

Johanna presents at major Agile conferences and has been a frequent (highly rated) speaker at Agile New England meetings. You can explore her books (20 and counting!) and writing at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

ANE and Agile – Our Past and Future

Danni Emriss — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 23:40:39 +0000

Join us for a special 20th birthday celebration panel discussion with a focus on stories from Agile New England’s past and ideas for our future.

The panelists:

Nancy Van Schooenderwoert
ANE Founder and Past President

Nancy Van Schooenderwoert is an independent Agile Coach and past president of Agile New England. As an electronics & software engineer for medical, aerospace, Industrial applications she was among the first to apply Agile methods to embedded systems work. Co-author of book series “Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Systems”, coaching Agile teams and managers since 1998. https://leanagilepartners.com.

Mike Dwyer
ANE Founder

Mike Dwyer has been active in the Agile/ Scrum communities for 20+ years as a practitioner, coach and teacher. Currently, he is curious about the power of the followers who make up the majority of team and Agile organizations.

Damon Poole
Past ANE President

Damon is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Coaching and Agile instructor, and the co-author of Professional Coaching for Agilists (Addison-Wesley). He has coached and trained thousands of people and presented at a wide variety of conferences and meetups. He has also co-created a series of popular Agile games including Heroes of Agility.

Johanna Rothman
Longtime, Frequent Speaker

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice
for your complex problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see
practical alternatives that help them achieve more agility in their
work. With that knowledge, they can choose what—and how—to adapt their
product development. See her writing and other resources at jrothman.com
and createadaptablelife.com.

Chet Hendrickson
Agile Expert

Chet Hendrickson has been involved with Agile Software Development since 1996, when as a member of Chrysler’s C3 project he helped develop Extreme Programming. Chet is the first signatory to the Agile Manifesto.

Modern Management: Adapt How You Lead for Agile Success

John Vins — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 02:00:40 +0000

Too many people say, “With agile, we don’t need no stinkin’ managers.” However, modern managers create and refine the agile culture. Without modern management, any agile initiative will die. It’s time to invite managers to change their behaviors and create a real agile culture.

In this session:

Learn 7 principles that create leadership (as opposed to management).
Understand and overcome myths that prevent management from achieving leadership excellence and agility.
Consider how managers can change their behaviors, realizing they don’t have to be perfect.

About the Speaker:

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, and Create Your Successful Agile Project. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

Free Your Agile Team: Focus on Flow Efficiency and Collaboration

Danni Emriss — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 14:40:41 +0000

Many Agile teams collaborate with a Product Owner, or maybe a customer. But how many team members collaborate as a team? Too few. Why? Because the reward system reinforces resource efficiency, not flow efficiency.

Focusing on flow efficiency frees the team to collaborate and deliver—as a team. Flow efficiency helps the organization focus on throughput—the outcome—rather than busyness—the output.

In this session you will learn:

How to see the signs of resource efficiency and flow efficiency.
What to measure and when to measure it.
How too-common metrics, such as velocity and burndown, might actually contribute to resource efficiency thinking instead of flow efficiency thinking.

About the Speaker:

Johanna Rothman is known as the “Pragmatic Manager” because of her practical approach to projects and management. She consults and coaches leaders from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Johanna has written 14 books, hundreds of articles and too-many-to-count blog posts. Her most recent agile books are Create Your Successful Agile Project, Manage Your Project Portfolio,2nd ed, and Agile and Lean Program Management. She writes an email newsletter, the Pragmatic Manager and two blogs on jrothman.com. Johanna is a favorite speaker at Agile New England events.

2018-09-06 Johanna Rothman

Agile: Massive Success or Empty Buzzword?

Danni Emriss — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 15:00:12 +0000

A few years ago hardly anyone knew what Agile meant. Now every development organization says they are “doing Agile.” Does this mean Agile is a success? Are we seeing the results we expected? Has the term been stretched so much as to become meaningless and lose credibility? Is there a “new new thing” coming along that will subsume Agile and capture the spotlight? What can we do to keep Agile vital and relevant?

In this “state of Agile” discussion, our panel of experts will address these topics and invite the audience to submit their own questions about the direction of Agile today.

About the panelists:

Ken Schwaber co-developed the Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s, signed the Agile Manifesto in 2001, and subsequently founded the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance. He recently left the Scrum Alliance to found Scrum.org. A 30-year veteran of the software development industry, he has written three books about Scrum: Agile Software Development with Scrum, Agile Project Management with Scrum, and The Enterprise and Scrum. You can read more about Ken Schwaber at kenschwaber.wordpress.com.

Linda Cook is on the board of directors of the Agile Alliance and is a Development Manager at PayPal. She is a Lean/Agile Coach and Certified Scrum Master with over twenty years’ experience in the IT industry, having held positions from developer, to forms designer, data modeler, analyst, tester and methodology lead. Her industry experience includes financial systems, insurance, education, research, manufacturing, publishing, and IT consulting.

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” provides frank advice for tough problems. She has been in the software industry for 35 years and has written eight books about management and project management. Her most recent book is Manage Your Job Search. Her upcoming book is Agile and Lean Program Management: Collaborating Across the Organization. Read more of her writing on www.jrothman.com.