Agility vs. Engineering
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
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?
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!
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…
Education and training becoming a Product Owner
Basic training as a product owner The role of product owner is the most demanding in the Scrum framework. He is, so to speak, the Superman who … has a product vision or develops it, knows the potential target markets, works with the stakeholders and weighs and takes into account their wishes and interests, collects,…
2020! It’s time to overcome old paradigms and practices
Old paradigms & practices It’s amazing how long outdated practices persist in our beliefs and our organizations. I can only speculate about the reasons for this: Perhaps because they are relatively simple and because they work quite well in the short term. Interestingly, the limitations of all these practices have been refuted early. Which are…
Blame the Management System not the Managers
“The prevailing management system has destroyed our people” wrote W. Edwards Deming 1990 in the preface of Peter M. Senge’s book “The fifth discipline”, that I’m currently reading again. He explicitly referred to the fact that both managers and employees lose through the prevailing management systems, as his famous saying also expresses: “A bad system…
What’s wrong with LEAN?
Most people think “Lean” is defined by reducing waste, less resources, less buffers and less people. Reading the definition of Lean carefully shows that it is defined by “more customer value with less resources”, which means a reduction of resources AFTER the creation of a better flow of customer value! In my opinion this misunderstanding…
Small Changes: Synchronizing department meetings
“People are afraid of big changes, but usually embrace little changes. The best thing about little changes is they add up to one big one” (Simon Sinek). This also corresponds to my experience. Under the slogan “small changes”, I would therefore like to share in this, and in following articles, some ideas that allow for…
Meetings, meetings, meetings. A new approach!
How does this work with meetings today? We have a topic to discuss or decide, think about which people we need and invite them to a meeting. But we are in a dilemma: If we invite too few people, the non-invited feel excluded. If we invite too many people, the meeting is tough and we…