Dr. Dominic Lindner, Autor bei agile Companies

Agile organization 21. March 2021

Agile scaling in companies

Agile scaling in the company – but how? Since the introduction of agility, we have been trying to scale it. The first step towards agile scaling was taken with Scrum of Scrums. Subsequently, a large number of agile evangelists began to think about solutions for a company-wide scaling of Scrum and wrote very exciting books and approaches from 2010 to 2016. LESS, DAD, SAFe? Is it all just marketing? It all started with the SAFe Framework by Leffingwell (2010). The magazines reported about this framework as being very bureaucratic and inflexible. Leffingwell has greatly improved this framework to date and releases new versions every year. More information is available in his new book . IBM then wanted to scale agility and, with Ambler and Lines in 2012, created Disciplined Agile Delivery, a collection of many best practices that were introduced in 2012 have been published as a book . In…

Agile organization 21. March 2021

Management Y and sociocracy

More quickly! More quickly! More quickly! The world is turning faster and faster. Doesn’t that seem like that to you too? More and more projects and emails have to be processed every day and all of this in parallel. According to many authors, there is a clear problem here between external and internal requirements of the company. According to Brandes et al. the concept of sociocracy. What this means, I already have in explained another article. From this framework, the authors Brandes et al. the framework “Management Y”. More humanity in management According to the authors, successful organizations display a mature and humane culture. A paradigm shift from management X to management Y is taking place. Management Y serves the employee. People are not lazy, they are ready to make good contributions to something big. Living Management Y fundamentally changes our image of man from authority to serving management. Brandes…

Agile departments 21. March 2021

Agile controlling, scrum and beyond budgeting

The Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon defines controlling as: “… sub-area of the corporate management system, the main task of which is the planning, management and control of all corporate areas.” In the context of an agile company, however, controlling has to reinvent itself to a certain extent. In this article, I would like to give a small preview of which approaches already exist and which questions still need to be clarified in the future. Role of controlling The presentation by Roman et al. (2014, p. 47) clarifies the new role of the agile Controlling. The discipline no longer acts in isolation as a single unit, but acts closely with management. This means that agile controlling in modern, agile companies is not only responsible for precise, customer-oriented reports, but also takes on coordination, moderation and decision-making role that is more oriented towards traditional management than before. Boundaries are softening and the different roles…

Agile departments 21. March 2021

Agile controlling, scrum and beyond budgeting

The Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon defines controlling as: “… sub-area of the corporate management system, the main task of which is the planning, management and control of all corporate areas.” In the context of an agile company, however, controlling has to reinvent itself to a certain extent. In this article, I would like to give a small preview of which approaches already exist and which questions still need to be clarified in the future. Role of controlling The presentation by Roman et al. (2014, p. 47) clarifies the new role of the agile Controlling. The discipline no longer acts in isolation as a single unit, but acts closely with management. This means that agile controlling in modern, agile companies is not only responsible for precise, customer-oriented reports, but also takes on coordination, moderation and decision-making role that is more oriented towards traditional management than before. Boundaries are softening and the different roles…

Digital change 21. March 2021

Digital transformation and agility

Digital transformation is one of, if not the greatest, challenge for companies in every industry. It is only a matter of time before this will find its way into every unit of business. Along with this trend, the dynamics and complexity will increase significantly. Expectations will change suddenly and companies will find themselves in a field of tension between traditional value creation and new digital business models. In order to master these challenges and overcome the hurdles, companies have to reinvent themselves. Above all, the necessary structural change in companies will be the greatest success factor in countering the challenges and the speed of digital transformation. Agility is becoming an increasingly important topic in the course of digital transformation and has long been a major feature in many areas, including outside of IT. Complexity and dynamics are counteracted with self-organization and resilience. Executives become servant leaders and companies act in…

Agile departments 21. March 2021

Agile test and Scrum

In research, software tests are the area that is closest to IT development. The area of software development is also increasingly defined by the Scrum principle, which of course has an impact on testing as a management discipline. In this article I would like to describe in detail what these effects look like and go into this in more depth in my research. Baumgartner et al. (2013, p. 3) show in the figure above that Scrum one process for all roles Are defined. In the picture you can see how this one process combines the roles of the project manager, requirements engineer and tester. “Test” as a discipline no longer exists in isolation from Scrum. Rather, like the other roles, the tester becomes part of the overall agile process. In the representation of Baumgartner et al. (2013, p. 101) we see how the role of the new, agile tester is…

Agile departments 21. March 2021

Agile test and Scrum

In research, software tests are the area that is closest to IT development. The area of software development is also increasingly defined by the Scrum principle, which of course has an impact on testing as a management discipline. In this article I would like to describe in detail what these effects look like and go into this in more depth in my research. Baumgartner et al. (2013, p. 3) show in the figure above that Scrum one process for all roles Are defined. In the picture you can see how this one process combines the roles of the project manager, requirements engineer and tester. “Test” as a discipline no longer exists in isolation from Scrum. Rather, like the other roles, the tester becomes part of the overall agile process. In the representation of Baumgartner et al. (2013, p. 101) we see how the role of the new, agile tester is…

Digital leadership 21. March 2021

Leadership in agile companies is more agile

We are now an “agile company” and we want to lead in a more agile manner! One hears this sentence very often from German managers. As Nowotny says in his book “agile companies – only what moves can improve”: We conjure up the spirit of Silicon Valley and break up the gray layers of clay in the company. A rethink should take place, away from philistinism. Everyone should get involved and the “German fear” should be taken away. But why are we doing this and are we doing the right thing at all? Companies move, because only what moves can change or what do you mean? Apparently this thesis is correct, because former startups such as Tesla, Amazon and Apple, which are now global corporations, make established corporations such as Daimler, VW, DHL and Rolex sweat (Nowotny 2016, p. 23ff). A vehicle development in just three hundred and sixty days…

Agile organization 21. March 2021

Reinventing Organizations: Organizations Yesterday and Today

Organizations are in constant change. A core task of the modern manager is to carry out changes together with employees and to actively involve them in the process. Especially in times of a shortage of skilled workers and constantly changing market conditions, it is important to make a company fit for the future. this has Frederic Laloux in his book Reinventing Organizations examines the organizational development of the last 100,000 (!) Years in detail and provides information on where modern organizations should move. Reinventing Organizations In his book, Laloux gives an insight into his research on organizational development. In addition, the author even moves back up to 100,000 years. He assigned a color to each of the epochs and characterized them precisely. This is how we start our journey through time of over 100,000 years of organizational development. I will only go into the individual phases of development very briefly…

Agile departments 21. March 2021

Beyond agile and agile software development

Agility has long been a fundamental part of IT and there is actually no more non-agile software development. Agility is now also expanding outside of IT. A related article about agile departments outside of IT already exist. But since agility was established, the question has often arisen: What will “Beyond Agile” come up with? Agile in the Waterfallworld In my Master thesis (Lindner 2015, p. 24) I have already researched the initial situation of agile departments and found that an IT department often has to react flexibly to typical waterfall customers and that agility stops after IT. In the current research project a year later, I notice that agility is slowly leaving IT. But IT departments will still have to react flexibly to each customer. So this has to be an important trait of the next level of agility. You can find a whitepaper: Agile team teams in waterfall organizations…