Delivering projects depending on multiple teams can be painful and slow, leading to an awful lot of coordination — but help is just around the corner. Make three decisions to let your projects flow. — tl;dr: Contemporary applications of the Theory of Constraints in the domain of knowledge work and agile product development do not suffice the needs of team-based organizations in which no single project is the same. This blog post closes a conceptual gap in applying the still relevant TOC to a modern…

Changing the timing for starting new work significantly increases speed, predictability, and (financial) throughput. How? Find out! — There are always more things on your plate than you can chew down in product development. And although this sadly is true, it doesn’t mean that you cannot do something about your chewing speed. Interestingly, many teams struggle heavily to increase their delivery speed and reliability. I write “interestingly” since…

Wendige und anpassungsfähige Organisationen erfordern konsequente Dezentralisierung sowie ernsthafte funktionale Integration. — Weltweit werden wir Zeuge scheiternder “agiler Transformationen”. Wir erleben, wie agile Initiativen in sich zerfallen oder abrupt für beendet erklärt werden. Agile Produktentwicklungsteams (z.B. Scrum-Teams) enttäuschen unisono die in sie gesteckten Hoffnungen. Mehr als zwanzig Jahre nach der Verkündung des agilen Manifests bescheinigen viele Menschen der agilen Bewegung und damit…

Warum “die Mäusestrategie” gefährlicher Unsinn ist — Der Begriff der Komfortzone ist unwissenschaftlich und dient als Sprachwaffe von vermeintlichen Autoritäten, um über andere Menschen zu urteilen. Mit der Komfortzone wurde ein gefälliges mentales Modell geschaffen, dass im Kontext von Unternehmensveränderungen die unbequeme Befassung mit menschlichen Motiven unnötig werden lässt und Wege, Veränderung inklusiv zu gestalten, versperrt. …

Um mit der Komplexität unserer Zeit umzugehen, bleibt nur der Weg in das dezentralisierte Wertschöpfungsnetzwerk — In den letzten zehn Jahren haben wir Komplexität als Realität unserer Arbeitsumgebung konstatiert, teilweise beklagt aber doch größtenteils anerkannt. Dabei ist es keineswegs so, dass die Komplexität in dieser Zeit sprunghaft gestiegen ist, vielmehr ist die Akzeptanz dieses Umstands gestiegen. Mit der Integration von Methoden und Praktiken der agilen Produktentwicklung…

A practical guide on preparing midterm interventions as an Agile Coach — Since agile coaching still is a profession under development people all over the world having this role are constantly figuring out how to best organize one’s working approach. As far as I can tell there is no one-size-fits-all that suits everyone out there. We can perceive that the personal traits…

Why Agile Coaches and Scrum Master became the new operations people back in 2005 and what to do about it. — Having Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches is great. Those jobs enjoy great popularity among companies on their way of being agile. Interestingly, many companies introducing those roles years ago still cannot claim to be agile. There are certainly many reasons why this is the case. Often, Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters…

Time to enrich your product development vocabulary. — “Always keep the users need in mind”, they say. But do we have the emotional literacy to confidently talk about human needs? I doubt it. I’ve been working with product development teams for quite some time now. In the last 10-or-so-years, almost no topic got stressed as much user-centricity. In…

Pick. Don’t prioritize. If you think you need to prioritize your backlog, you most probably don’t. But if you can’t avoid it try this effective approach and save you and your team time and energy along the way. — One question I frequently receive from teams, from product owners, and also from (executive) managers is the question: “How do we prioritize our work properly?”. In this post, I want to briefly indicate what seems to be the best way to prioritize a backlog in product development and knowledge work…