hardScrum Blog

Models for cost consideration in product development

March 7, 2021March 21, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

Classic management likes to argue with cost aspects when it comes to changing and optimizing processes. In this article, we will disregard all social aspects concerning employees for the moment and just compare the bare figures. It is about the widespread misconception that a company only operates profitably when all employees are working at full…

Performance goals vs. behavior goals

February 4, 2021March 4, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

Performance reviews aim to assess employee performance. This data has a major impact on promotions and salary increases. This is about status and income, two of the most important motivating factors for employees. As such, they have a massive impact on employee behavior. “We have lost our way but are making good progress” But, what…

Multi-project management: The holy grail of management

November 1, 2020February 6, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld 1 Comment

It is a sad fact that in knowledge work in today’s VUCA environment the matrix organization and projects are less and less successful. Reasons for this is are … projects are often planned without sufficient consideration of the already running projects, the totality of the projects use the capacities of the involved resources and employees…

Work slower to be faster

September 27, 2020February 6, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

In our modern world, the work of many people no longer consists of manual labor, but rather mental work, which is also called “Knowledge Work”. Knowledge Work is characterized by the fact that it cannot be accelerated by external pressure. If at all, this is only possible through the inner (intrinsic) motivation of knowledge workers.…

Outdated or improved Process Models?

September 20, 2020February 7, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

The evolution of process models When discussing process models, one often gets the impression that there is a kind of war between the representatives of the models and that the representatives of the models act more like evangelists. My opinion is that every process model has advanced product development, at least in some aspects. Some…

The hero and the team

August 6, 2020September 25, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

… or how little things affect team performance. Some time ago I accompanied a team that had recently started using agile methods. The task of the team was to create test cases for a large system and to maintain them. The team had recently started to estimate the effort to create test cases using “story…

Agility vs. Engineering

May 3, 2020June 2, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

Is agile product development and the application of engineering practices a contradiction, can they be combined or do they even complement each other? In this article we want to investigate this question.

Version 1 launched! Our scaled agile development framework for physical products

April 22, 2020May 1, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

The P4-Dev framework describes a new type of organizational structure for companies that develop physical products. Together with its sister framework P4-Ops for operational business, it describes a holistic operating system for product creation in modern organizations that implement the principles of lean, agility and New Work. Version 1 has now been launched in German…

How to create Adaptive and Resilient organizations?

March 15, 2020March 15, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

In times of the Corona virus, managers have to think about their organizations, how they can better deal with crises in the future and how they can act in crises. Due to different working conditions, such as more frequent work in the home office, you may now have the time to think about changes. This…

Assign as late as possible!

February 9, 2020March 8, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

Many organizations have policies that force work to be assigned as early as possible. For many support organizations there is a goal that stipulates a maximum response time to customer inquiries. Unfortunately, there is a common misunderstanding here: the rule of reacting as quickly as possible to a customer request does not also mean assigning…