Agility (in general) – hardScrum Blog

Multi-project management: The holy grail of management

November 1, 2020February 6, 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, 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.

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, 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Old paradigms & practices It’s amazing how long outdated practices persist in our beliefs and our organizations.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, 2019February 8, 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, 2019March 6, 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…

Bringing it all together: Scrum, Lean, SAFe, LeSS, Design Thinking and Lean Startup

March 24, 2019May 1, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

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

February 3, 2019September 29, 2019 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

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…