A bottleneck is a weak point in business management, which is loud Wikipedia “has the highest utilization in the entire process chain in a period of time and thus inhibits the workflow.” Let’s imagine a real bottle from which we pour water into a glass. The outlet speed of the bottle is determined by the narrowest point, i.e. the bottle neck. The narrower the neck of the bottle, the less water gets into our glass. This metaphor has also established itself in business administration. A bottleneck can often be recognized by the queue, which is limited by it, for example the water in the bottle. In business administration, different work processes often flow together in a bottleneck and are checked, for example, or waiting for decisions. If the bottleneck is too slow, the processes jam and there are waiting times. But what does a bottleneck have to do with the…

You know it when someone suggests changes and these are far from reality? The resistance is often massive and the implementation is often far too complex. Especially in an agile context, changes should be carried out directly from the classic organization to the cool start-up. But this alone is not an agile approach. The magic word is “small steps” to the goal and then gradually evaluate and improve. One way of doing this is through maturity models. A maturity model helps to evaluate and improve processes in the company. For this case, I would like to present an agile maturity model that I like to use. A company can often only assess the degree of maturity based on gut instinct. Dimensions of the agile maturity model First of all, let me introduce you to the first dimension: This is the actual degree of maturity of the organization. This has to…

You know that: You want a change in the company and the management appoints an employee to commission the change (without management power). If you see this change officer again after a few months, you recognize a stressed and sad person and the change in the company may have progressed by 5%. Maybe that’s even you? Change in the company is not easy and I often talk to blog readers on the phone who ask me for help with my own change project. There is good news and bad news. The bad thing is: You cannot overcome certain barriers in a company without power and you need a manager for help and the good thing is: I have put together great frameworks for everything else at the end of the article. Resistance and change Look at the picture below. You notice that we usually freeze in one state (comfort zone).…

Self-organization has many faces and can be implemented in a wide variety of ways in the company. Two possibilities are holacracy and sociocracy, which I want to highlight in this article. I get a lot of questions from entrepreneurs who ask me whether I know companies that still implement this. Of course, I know some startups that deal with it successfully, but I don’t know any traditional and established companies that still use it. In the following I would like to tell you why. What is Sociocracy and Holocracy? My own experience I myself was able to attend a holacracy in 2016 and the frameworks were discussed and tried out in my roundtables as part of my research. Unfortunately, my holacracy crashed after a few weeks. Especially egos in the company and employees who work according to regulations do not fit this framework. One often experiences a standstill when the…

You probably know the adage: Self-organization needs leadership – surely you, as a specialist or manager, try to introduce this more and more into the company, but it really doesn’t want to spark. The employees keep asking for a boss and it doesn’t really work out. Situations like the one in the picture are unfortunately not uncommon. But why does it fail? Basically, based on my research, I can say that in every company a certain number of employees simply do not feel like organizing themselves. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it between 9 am and 5 pm”. Most of the time, these employees are very hardworking and important to the company. In my experience, it even correlates with the Rogers theory in the picture. If you want to increase self-organization in the company, 2.5% of employees usually do this on their own and often infect 13.5%…

“Where the wind of change blows, some walls and others build windmills” is a Chinese proverb. This article is aimed at everyone who is currently looking for a change in a company and / or who are also commissioned for this. In this article, I would like to deal primarily with the question of motivation for change and explain appropriate procedures to you depending on your motivation. In the past few years I have often been to clients as a consultant and have advised on change projects. As a change agent, you can be quickly relieved of your position or burned in the company. It is therefore important to categorize the change correctly and to choose the appropriate procedure. I often experience change agents who approach a change full of emotion and passion. That is good, but a change should also be carried out according to a certain system and…

With the advent of agility and agile methods in companies, more and more new positions have emerged. One of them is through the job description agile manager (aM). And with the hype surrounding this more modern form of work organization, more and more companies are also being transferred to a project-oriented approach. The waterfall scheme, which had been precisely timed and planned for many years, had to give way to new approaches such as Scrum more and more often. This has fundamentally changed the structure of the work for employees. Because from now on they were assigned to work in sprint teams with completely new job titles and sometimes completely changing task packages. However, these changes also require good organization. And this is exactly where the professional field comes in agile manager in the game. In the following, I would like to explain exactly how its functions and responsibilities look.…

Scrum has been spreading more and more in German companies over the past few years. And this also opens up positions for so-called Scrum Masters (SM) at the same time. However, the actual tasks of these leaders are often drastically underestimated even by the people involved. Because as an SM, the range of tasks is much broader than simply “facilitating” your own team. In this article I would like to explain exactly how the function, the responsibilities and the scope of duties of a Scrum Master look like. Range of tasks of a Scrum Master In many job positions there are precise descriptions, responsibilities and requirements that relate to a specific activity. In the case of Scrum Masters, however, it looks a little different. You should be understood more as an all-rounder who, together with the product owner and the development team, make up the Sarum team. The Scrum Master…

When working in the Scrum team, there are different positions that have to be filled and each of which is assigned different responsibilities. One of them describes the des Product owner . As manager of the product backlog, he leads the development team and is responsible for increasing the value of the product. In this article, I would like to describe in more detail what a product owner does in his daily work. The Product Owner in the Scrum Team hierarchy Within Scrum, the product owner can be found in the area of project and product management. Since the Scrum model is designed to break down large tasks into smaller sub-tasks and thus convert complex problems into more easily resolvable individual problems, the product owner’s task here is to closely monitor the development of the project. This means, for example, that you have to regularly optimize and adapt the long-term…

You all know it: trench warfare between sales and IT. They can cost businesses a lot of money and are often nerve-wracking. The problems are obvious: While sales based on commissions are more aimed at closing sales (quantity), IT is careful to build high-quality systems. You can imagine that friction is inevitable. In this article I use exaggerated metaphors to better show the scenario. Agility in sales is not a solution #agile sales One solution can be that you simply want to use agile methods in sales. I’ve been called a lot lately and asked how to set up agile sales. I hear sentences from managers like: “Our sales department should become more agile” and from clueless salespeople: “Well, we’re trying to do that with the sprints, but somehow that doesn’t bring us anything”. The perplexed salespeople are absolutely right in my opinion. A salesperson is inherently agile because he…