Agile and Lean Program Management (PragProg)

If you’re trying to use agile and lean strategies at the program level, you’ve heard of several approaches, all about scaling processes. If you duplicate what one team does for several teams, you get bloat, not delivery. Instead of scaling the process, scale everyone’s collaboration.

Johanna Rothman @jrothman

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Scale collaboration, not process.

If you’re trying to use agile and lean strategies at the program level, you’ve heard of several approaches, all about scaling processes. If you duplicate what one team does for several teams, you get bloat, not delivery. Instead of scaling the process, scale everyone’s collaboration.

With autonomy, collaboration, and exploration, teams and program-level people can decide how to apply agile and lean principles to their own work. The feature teams build momentum, using whatever forms of agile or lean work for them. The program teams use lean inside a cadence to make sure the entire product is done and ready to release. The entire program uses empirical data to see and understand status.

Collaborate around deliverables, not meetings. Learn which measurements to use and how to use those measures to help people deliver more of what you want (value) and less of what you don’t want (work in progress). Create an environment of servant leadership and small-world networks. Enable autonomy, collaboration, and exploration across the organization, and deliver your product.


“Johanna Rothman’s new book is the definitive guide to program management in the agile and lean world. I found it invaluable in crystallizing in my mind how to marry agile and lean principles to program management. It’s a book that you will turn to when somebody asks you a tricky question that you know will be better articulated by Johanna.”

–Owain Griffiths
Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks


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