hardScrum Blog

Working slower to be faster

September 27, 2020September 27, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

When we see the organization for the first time, the product development process includes the following steps: Create initial product concept (application team) Elaborate product configuration (application team) Product design: 3D models, parts lists, drawings and approval (engineering team) Prototyping: component procurement, manufacturing and delivery (production) Measurements on the prototypes (in several laboratories) Pre-analysis of…

Outdated or improved Process Models?

September 20, 2020September 20, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

or “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.…

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…

2020! It’s time to overcome old paradigms and practices

January 16, 2020July 10, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

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

November 3, 2019June 8, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

“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?

October 27, 2019November 26, 2019 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

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…