Team Setup – 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…

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…

Version 1 launched! Our scaled agile development framework for physical products

April 22, 2020May 1, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

The P4-Dev framework describes a new type of organizational structure for companies that develop physical products. Together with its sister framework P4-Ops for operational business, it describes a holistic operating system for product creation in modern organizations that implement the principles of lean, agility and New Work. Version 1 has now been launched in German…

Meetings, meetings, meetings. A new approach!

September 28, 2019September 27, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld 2 Comments

How does this work with meetings today? We have a topic to discuss or decide, think about which people we need and invite them to a meeting. But we are in a dilemma: If we invite too few people, the non-invited feel excluded. If we invite too many people, the meeting is tough and we…

Projects don’t work in a resource limited system

August 11, 2019August 11, 2022 Oliver Schönfeld 2 Comments

Why are projects no longer working in our product development organizations today? And why did they work for such a long time? . There are certainly many reasons for this, but in my opinion these can be traced back to one main cause: Today’s development organizations usually work not only at the limit,…

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…

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

March 24, 2019October 30, 2021 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…

Our companies represent the last medieval feudal systems of the western world

December 22, 2018March 14, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

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]

The Organizational Model of Knowledge Work

December 16, 2018August 5, 2024 Oliver Schönfeld 1 Comment

Organizing Knowledge Work and Knowledge Workers is a big challenge in today’s complex and fast-changing work environments. But what is Knowledge Work actually? According to Peter F. Drucker, the 20th century management pope, Knowledge Work is defined as “work where the worker has to think”. Thus, they are “workers who are not paid for their…