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Diversity vs Patriarchy – Let’s catch the next Wave!

Recently, I attended a conference dealing with organizational change. One of the sessions there was about human resources (HR). This is the department of an organization that is supposed to support individuals within the organization. Here people were talking about how to evaluate the skills of employees, how to train them and the role of leadership in all this. At one point during this session a young woman from the audience got up and confronted a high-ranked HR manager from a large German energy provider, also female, with an interesting subject.

The young woman said that she was at the very beginning of her career. She recently read that a study, which shows that the careers of women are often hindered by other women, not so much by men. This sounded counter intuitive to her, as she thought women would support each other.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

From Scrum to Kanban

Or: The Difference between Pre-Launch and Post-Launch of an E-Commerce Project

Every e-commerce project has this one moment that changes everything: The launch. From that magical moment on your efforts are made available to real users and are due to earn real money. The whole organization faces a major shift. The parts of an organization external from the development team change their modus operandi. In their perspective, what used to be an abstract future suddenly becomes an active system facing customers.

It’s a known fact that in any e-commerce project, the development never stops. Throughout the whole project there will be bugs to be fixed and new features to be implemented, no matter on which side of the cut-over you are. What changes is the attention brought to the project from the organization as well as the emergence of topics. Thus, the development of the e-commerce project faces its biggest struggle when switching from implementation to in-life-support mode. This struggle cannot be ignored by the development process. 

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Tech vs UX – Why the struggle?

We live in a world of digital full service agencies and companies that deliver the full brand experience, from a complex technical backend to a fancy frontend. This requires specialists of opposing fields with very contradicting backgrounds to closely collaborate in order to achieve great goals.

Impressive success stories of cross functional teams, where UX designers and software engineers cooperate happily are widely spread [3, 4]. Just as descriptions on how to organize this way [1, 2]. However, these success stories rather document the exception. Truth is that most agencies are struggling with this organization of team collaboration. In order to understand this problem, let’s have a look where the two professions came from.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Knowledge Management Strategies

Large parts of my PhD thesis are based on a theory by Morten T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria, and Thomas Tierney [1]. In their article the authors analyze different consulting companies and define two basic strategies for knowledge management: The codification and the personalization. An organization has to follow one of those, the one that fits to the competitive strategy best.

Note: Most of the text from this post is directly taken from my PhD thesis. That is also the reason why this text is so long and detailed…
Sorry for that. 🙂
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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Scrum Product Owner

Last week I attended a course for my certification as a Scrum Product Owner, held by Craig Larman. He is very inspiring and taught us in two days the details of scrum and about the responsibilities of a product owner. The underlying concept of scrum is a high ability to learn and change, which helps to improve and provides a competitive advantage. Being agile makes changes easy and cheap.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Knowledge Management in Software Development

Last Thursday, I successfully defended my PhD thesis [1]. My PhD studies were supervised by Peter Axel Nielsen and took part in the Research Centre for Socio-Interactive Design of the Computer Science Department of Aalborg University. The committee members that assessed my thesis were Keld Bødker, John Krogstie and Jan Stage. The defence itself consisted of a presentation of my research for 45 minutes, followed by almost two hours of examination.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Du bist was Du isst

In meinem ja inzwischen nicht mehr allzukurzem Leben habe ich mich nicht immer gut ernährt. Aber wohl selten so schlecht wie zur Zeit. Mein ganzer Fokus liegt auf meiner Abschlussarbeit. Dafür vernachlässige ich mich selbst leider bisschen. Schlimm ist, dass das auch noch relativ bewusst geschieht. Sehenden Auges, sozusagen. An Read more…

By Karsten Jahn, ago