PSL Reader

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 then decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 20 books and hundreds of articles. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

She is the author of these books:

• Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
• Successful Independent Consulting: Relationships That Focus on Mutual Benefit
• Modern Management Made Easy triad: Manage Yourself, Lead and Serve Others, Lead an Innovative Organization
• Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
• Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
• From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver (with Mark Kilby)
• Create Your Successful Agile Project
• Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
• Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule
• Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding The Real Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
• Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
• Manage Your Job Search
• Hiring Geeks That Fit
• Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd ed.
• The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
• Corrective Action for the Software Industry (with Denise Robitaille)

In addition, she is a contributor to:

• Center Enter Turn Sustain: Essays on Change Artistry
• Readings for Problem Solving Leadership

For fiction:

• Sometime in Winter (a novella)

I started my career as a programmer, and over the years I’ve worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant and manager. From all these perspectives, one thing became clear: our level of individual, team and company success was deeply impacted by our work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, I have spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success.

As well as editing this collection, I've co-authored two other books:  Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. I contributed to Center, Enter, Turn, Sustain: Essays on Change Artistry and Readings for Problem-Solving Leadership.

My most recent book is 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results. It is available on amazon.com.

My goal is to create sustainable work environments that fulfill organizational needs and enable personal growth. I work with executives and managers building coherent organizational structures, processes and goals where teams can flourish. I base my consulting on systems thinking and human systems dynamics focused on increasing the organization’s ability to deliver user value. Nationally, I've worked with clients from Jacksonville, FL to Seattle, WA. I also work internationally when requested.

I've always been interested in helping smart people be happy and productive. To that end, I've published books on human behavior, including Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method, The Psychology of Computer Programming, Perfect Software and Other Fallacies, and an Introduction to General Systems Thinking. I've also written books on leadership including Becoming a Technical Leader, The Secrets of Consulting (Foreword by Virginia Satir), More Secrets of Consulting, and the nine-volume Quality Software series.

I try to incorporate my knowledge of science, engineering, and human behavior into all of my writing and consulting work (with writers, hi-tech researchers, software engineers, and people whose life-situation could require the use of a service dog). I write novels about such people, including The Aremac Project, Aremac Power, Jigglers, First Stringers, Second Stringers, The Hands of God, Freshman Murders, Where There's a Will There's a Murder, Earth's Endless Effort, and Mistress of Molecules—all about how my brilliant protagonists produce quality work and learn to be happy. My books that are not yet on Leanpub may be found as eBooks at <http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JerryWeinberg>; on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B000AP8TZ8; and at Barnes and Noble bookstore: http://tinyurl.com/4eudqk5.

Early in my career, I was the architect for the Project Mercury's space tracking network and designer of the world's first multiprogrammed operating system. I won the Warnier Prize, the Stevens Award, and the first Software Testing Professionals' Luminary Award, all for my writing on software quality. I was also elected a charter member of the Computing Hall of Fame in San Diego and chosen for the University of Nebraska Hall of Fame.

But the "award" I'm most proud of is the book, The Gift of Time (Fiona Charles, ed.) written by my student and readers for my 75th birthday. Their stories make me feel that I've been at least partially successful at helping smart people be happy.