Agile Management – hardScrum Blog

Openess vs Psychological Safety

October 24, 2025October 24, 2025 Oliver Schönfeld

To encourage openness during a retrospective, the so-called “Las Vegas principle” is often applied. This means promising that statements made during the retrospective will not be shared outside the group. However, this can be problematic if the improvements require the cooperation of managers or other teams. And what does the Scrum Guide actually say about…

Management teams: The better alternative?!

June 11, 2023June 12, 2023 Oliver Schönfeld 1 Comment

The P4-Dev framework provides a comprehensive approach to product development, particularly one that leverages pragmatic, lean, and agile practices. The three key roles within this framework are the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the System Engineer, each of which has distinct responsibilities but also have to work in harmony to ensure the successful execution…

Is there an agile milestone process?

November 22, 2022June 10, 2023 Oliver Schönfeld 4 Comments

Since the use of agile practices in physical product development, the question has arisen as to whether classic product development methods can or should be completely replaced, used alongside one another, or combined. Behind this is primarily the desire of organizations to retain processes that have already been introduced for the most part, or not…

A culture change is a change of management behavior

June 19, 2022August 4, 2024 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

The change of an organization only works if the organizational culture is suitable for it or if the 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…

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…

Models for cost consideration in product development

March 7, 2021December 28, 2022 Oliver Schönfeld

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, 2021January 6, 2023 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…