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.
Category: Agility (in general)
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…
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Old paradigms & practices It’s amazing how long outdated practices persist in our beliefs and our organizations.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…
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…
The fundamental misunderstanding of agile Management
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!
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
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…
Bringing it all together: Scrum, Lean, SAFe, LeSS, Design Thinking and Lean Startup
Meanwhile, in the world of lean and agile, there are many frameworks, as well as collections of practices and methods, all of which seem to be very different, but have similar or even equal values. In part, they even describe the same things but name them differently. Unfortunately, this creates a lot of confusion for…
Why I favour Knowledge Gaps over Hypotheses
Hypothesis is a term and concept used by Eric Ries’ Lean Startup. The idea behind it is that the organization confirms or disproves one or more (business) assumptions as quickly as possible. Quote from Eric Ries on 4 common misconceptions about lean startup: “I have the idea of fail almost. It’s like I’m trying to…
Our companies represent the last medieval feudal systems of the western world
The good thing is that prisoners can quit! The bad thing is that today the feudal lords mostly don’t have fools who tell them the unvarnished truth. [Artwork: Creators of the Chronicle of Bishop Otto of Freising; Photo: AndreasPraefcke [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons]