hardScrum Blog

A culture change is a change of management behavior

June 19, 2022June 20, 2022 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

The change of an organization only works if the organizational culture is suitable for it or if this cultural change is part of the change. But, what actually is organizational culture? Here is my definition: Organizational culture is the behavior of people within the organization that is considered normal and how the rest of the organization…

Misconception of Agility #2: We don’t plan

February 20, 2022February 20, 2022 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

There are many misconceptions about agility in product development. There are those who think they can leave out everything except implementation: We don’t document, we don’t test, everything is changeable at any time. In addition, there are many people who think that there is no planning in agile product development. “Today we are really agile…

Modern interdisciplinary organizational setups

November 7, 2021May 18, 2022 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

In organization theory, a distinction is made between the organizational structure and the process organization. In classical organizations the department structure corresponds to the organizational line structure, whereby these form usually functional units and summarize thus specialized coworkers (e.g. sales, production)*. The classical expiration organization is regulated thereby either over work processes, which regulate the…

Misconception of Agility #1: Total flexibility

September 26, 2021October 4, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

There are many misconceptions about how to understand agility in product development. There are those who think they can leave out everything except implementation: We don’t document, we don’t test, we don’t plan. There are also a lot of people who have unrealistic hopes for the adoption of Agility, e.g.: “We can change anything at…

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, 2020November 7, 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, 2020October 30, 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…