Service companies such as IT consulting, insurance agencies, tax advice and much more often consider how agility can take place in harmony with the customer. The aim is a high degree of flexibility with regard to customer requirements and Scrum is often not a direct solution due to the long sprint times in an ad hoc business. I would like to give a recommendation for action in this article. Spotify model The streaming service Spotify was founded in 2006, today has sales of over 4 billion euros and has 3,000 employees. This success story can be traced back to a wide variety of factors. One of them is the agile organizational form of Spotify, which is now taken as a model by numerous companies. The Spotify model provides for so-called squads to be defined for certain areas. These are loose groups that have a specific purpose and work in an…

You have probably heard of the Scrum method in connection with agile teams. Then you must have asked yourself: What is Scrum? Perhaps you are currently looking for a way to manage your teams in a more self-organized but structured manner? If you are willing to give up a bit of responsibility for this, but at the same time want to lead your employees to a more efficient way of working, then Scrum is probably just right for you. What is scrum It belongs like Kanban to agile methods and describes a way to better manage projects. With the help of Scrum, developments within a project can be promoted better. The self-organization of the cross-functional teams as a whole and their individual members is promoted in the course of this. This means that although the goal and direction of a goal are specified, the design of the way to get…

You know it: You have a suggestion for improvement and you approach specialist teams or managers and nobody listens to you. That can be frustrating and as a manager you probably know the problem: You want to make your company more agile, but nobody has time. I would like to explain in more detail what happens to individual employees when you approach them with a decision or suggestion. To do this, we imagine that our receptivity and stress level is a glass that only has a certain capacity. I illustrate this using the example of the decision: “We are now doing agile!”. Look at the picture. Our employee (project manager) is currently slightly stressed. He has a lot to do in the project and is a little sick (therefore two stress bars). Now the management announces it: from next week you will do Scrum and will be the Scrum Master…

Who does not know it? Escalations in everyday work, projects and companies. Escalation means “calling up a higher hierarchy level to bring about a decision when the situation cannot be dealt with with one’s own authority. Escalation is the counterpart to delegation. ”(Source Project magazine ) Escalation in colloquial language In common parlance, escalation has a negative connotation and means that a conflict or problem has to be resolved by management and this leads to unrest and stress in the project. I also had a difficult project myself in my time as a consultant. I experienced 2-4 escalations every day. It was a difficult time and not only the sickness rate of my employees was very high, but also very low motivation and work progress. Escalation as a formal process Overall, escalation can also be a formal process be. Classic organizations dictate that every level has everyone Should make decisions…

Kanban is now often used in IT for agile software management. The method helps teams to communicate and manage information transparently. In addition, the associated teams are organized autonomously in their work, which means that Kanban often makes agile project management more efficient. For these reasons in particular, it has long since become a popular method in change management. origin However, Kanban originally comes from the automotive industry, but it can also be easily transferred to other industries. The term translates as “visual map / board” (“kan” stands for “visualize” and “ban” for map or board). It comes from the Japanese and was developed by Toyota. They recognized the power of visualizing tasks for a more effective way of working a long time ago. Maps with project steps show the need for tasks to be carried out at any time. This enables the teams themselves, but also across departments, to…

The Lean Startup method is on everyone’s lips and is described as best practice. The inventor Eric Ries describes how a product with few chapters can be tried out on the market. The author gives practical examples such as from Dropbox: Dropbox had a landing page online. The founders bought several clicks via Google Adwords. Interested parties could enter their e-mail address in a mailing list in order to receive the beta version of the product when it was ready. The two founders collected 75,000 emails within a few hours. Only then was the Dropbox product built. Thus the idea was evaluated and implemented very favorably. In my opinion, Lean Startup has three phases. While the first phase deals with testing assumptions and building a prototype, phase 2 looks for scaling and phase 3 for growth. In the following I would like to explain the three phases in more detail…

I have been asked a lot about strategies of agile change lately and managers in strategy development and students in their thesis want to be able to grasp these better. I can reassure you in the first step. This “agile” is not new rocket science or calls for a fundamentally new strategy. Agility is roughly the same as any other change that you have been implementing in the company for years. So you can also introduce agility with the currently known classic change models. Almost every model has its origin in the considerations of Kurt Lewin, who in 1943 classified a change in three phases. Basically, two forces work in organizations: own security strivings and habits that demand the maintenance of the status quonew technologies, executives new competitors who demand changes Kurt Lewin then established in 1947 that change only takes place as soon as the force of necessity for…

Agility is a big topic in almost every company and I often have conversations with decision-makers or students who are looking for a topic related to agility for their thesis. In the numerous conversations I noticed, one thing struck me: When it comes to agility, it’s always a question of perspective. I differentiate between corporations and SMEs (small and medium-sized companies – up to 249 employees and 50 million sales). For a long time I thought about how exactly the differences could be and couldn’t come up with a meaningful answer myself. Piercy, N., & Rich, N. (2015) examined in the study: “The relationship between lean operations and sustainable operations” in 5 case studies the connection between agility and stability in companies. It struck me that the study did not directly examine my question, but showed me two exciting goals of agility: Introduction of agility with the aim of increasing…