Agility (in general) – 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…

P4 Modelling Game

June 8, 2025October 11, 2025 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

Das P4-Modelling-Game eignet sich hervorragend in Schulungen und zu Ausbildung, um die Begriffe klarer zu machen. Dazu bekommt ein Teilnehmer oder eine Gruppe eine Frage, die dann mit einem Kartenmodell zu beantworten ist. Hier ein paar Beispiele: Wer gehört zum Team? Der Team-Scrum-Master, der Team-Product-Owner und das Working-Team sind Teil des Teams. Welche (Team-)Product…

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…

Agility vs. Engineering

May 3, 2020October 30, 2021 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.

Assign as late as possible!

February 9, 2020May 27, 2022 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, 2020February 6, 2021 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Old paradigms & practices It’s amazing how long outdated practices persist in our beliefs and our organizations.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…

Small Changes: Synchronizing department meetings

October 6, 2019October 6, 2019 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

“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…

The fundamental misunderstanding of agile Management

June 13, 2019October 30, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld 2 Comments

The new way of organizing and working according to lightweight and flow-oriented principles has led to a rethinking in many organizations and in many individuals. However, there are still some misconceptions, especially with the term “agile management”.

Don’t change the Scrum rules when starting!

April 28, 2019August 18, 2019 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

One critcal question when starting with Scrum often is: “What can we change in Scrum to better fit our organizational structure needs?” It is for sure far simpler to modify the rules of Scrum than to change behaviour within the organization, but this will always foster the classical structures and won’t lead to a change…

Task Forces – the dark side of project management

April 18, 2019October 30, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld 1 Comment

Task forces have been established as a fire-fighting measure in project management when projects are in trouble or are seriously delayed. Usually they occur relatively late in the project, when nothing else worked. Interestingly, they usually work relatively well, as they are given the highest priority. Also, leaders of task forces are often celebrated as…