article thumbnail

Effective Agility: Three Suggestions to Change How You and Your Team Work, Part 2

Johanna Rothman

This can work well if you demo something at least monthly once you start writing code and tests. Tip 3: Demo Something Monthly (At a Minimum) The more your project demos your progress, the more other people—especially managers—will trust you. If you can demo once a week, very few people will ask for estimates.

Agile 71
article thumbnail

Large Features and Long Deadlines Mean You Have a Gantt Chart, Not a Roadmap

Johanna Rothman

Demo on a regular cadence. Which means you can demo at will. Demo Early and Often. If you want to move your managers from “we need it all” thinking to “how little” thinking, demo every single time you release a slice. Record the demo. The demo is part of your data.

Agile 143
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

When Writing Has Two Focuses: Invite Ideal Readers to Change and Assure Secondary Readers

Johanna Rothman

Her ideal readers are the teams doing the work, so they can change their demos and reporting frequency. As a company, we need more demos and more data. However, we all need to see weekly demos according to the attached format. Please ensure your demo is ready every Wednesday by noon Eastern. Was Polly a little snarky?

Report 89
article thumbnail

How to Create Partnerships Instead of Using Stakeholders

Johanna Rothman

” For years, I explained that the more often the team or program could demo, the more the project or program could engage its stakeholders. See Customers, Internal Delivery, And Trust for a recent post about demos and trust.) The more frequently you can demo, the more your partners can trust you to deliver something.

How To 125
article thumbnail

Best Practices for Accelerating the Sales Process

Think about it: with outbound prospecting, requests from management, scheduled demos, and inbound calls, chaos can quickly work its way into your strategy, deeming a “speed wins” selling mentality downright ineffective. The bottom line is that, in B2B sales, speed is useless without control.

article thumbnail

Possible Test for Splitting Stories and Valuable Minimums

Johanna Rothman

No one wants to demo this work, because everyone thinks the demo will wander all over the place. Worse, no one wants to demo, because they can't see the value for any user. Use the Demo to Guide Sizing. Use the Demo to Guide Sizing. Start with the demo in mind. I bet you can think of more tests.

article thumbnail

With Agile Approaches, No Need to “Meet” or “Enforce” Deadlines

Johanna Rothman

Because the “teams” couldn't deliver something small, they didn't demo very often. Over months, they stopped demoing anything. Because no one saw any demos, management couldn't trust the teams to deliver. Then, the managers asked the teams to demo something every week instead of measuring schedule variance.

Agile 85