Change Management: Resistance is Fruitful!

Resilience is probably THE buzzword of our time. Everyone is looking for people that are easy to adapt to changing situations. Because those who are not are wasting our time. That’s at least what some managers seem to think. While actually, this train of thought pushes the results of bad change management to the people.  (more…)

Don’t be so theoretical!

This goes out to all change agents, all teachers and coaches, everyone that tries to introduce a paradigm shift of some sort. Be it helping a society to understand the value of diversity, or helping a company to understand the need of transformational leadership, or helping a team to organize differently (#agile), or helping your clients (or however you want to call the people you’re dealing with) to do their work in a different way… Whenever a person claims for something to be too academic, you’re doing something wrong!  (more…)

Leadership – What it is and how it should be done

I work in a company, where we have team leads, supporting the employees to develop and making sure that this development is aligned to the competitive goals of the company. I’m sure you can relate to this one way or the other. Maybe it’s a line manager or a department director or whatnot. That however is the leadership I want to discuss here. Not the leadership of a CEO towards the whole organization or the leadership of HR managers defining the development structures of an organization. (more…)

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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Mein Interview mit Roman Neustädter

Roman Neustädter ist meines Erachtens nach der intelligenteste und taktisch am schlausten agierende Spieler bei Schalke 04. Das steht im Gegensatz zur allgemeinen Meinung unter Schalkern, aber ich kann meine Sicht da ganz gut begründen, schließlich mach ich das auch regelmäßig (siehe Roman Neustädter, Fußballgott). Jedenfalls lag da der Wunsch nahe, ein Fachgespräch Fußball mit ihm zu führen.

Ich habe ihn gefragt, er hat zugesagt und ehe ich’s mich versah sitzen wir uns am Schalttag 2016 gegenüber. Aufgeregt wie ein 5-jähriges Kind zu Weihnachten sitze ich da und er sagt mir, wie cool er findet, was ich mache. Er freute sich, dass ich seine Spielweise detailliert so beschrieben hätte, wie er selbst sie sähe und wie vermutlich auch Favre ihn immer gesehen hatte. Bämm. (more…)

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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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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Win8 App: TacticTab

Nach der Abgabe meiner Doktorarbeit, habe ich ein bisschen Zeit investiert und ein kleines Hobby-Projekt gestartet: Die Entwicklung meiner ersten eigenen App. Ich wollte ein Tool bauen, dass mir dabei hilft Fußballspiele zu analysieren und die Formationen, bzw. die Staffelungen, der Mannschaften leicht aufzuzeichnen. Das ging dann sogar recht fix. Leider hielten mich technische Probleme davon ab das ganze zu veröffentlichen… (more…)

Bundesligatippspielvorhersage

FußballvorhersageIch bin ein ziemlicher Fußball-Nerd geworden. Lese Taktik Blogs, Bücher von Leuten die auf der Suche nach dem perfekten Spiel sind und all sowas. Außerdem wälze ich Statistiken nach Spielen und überlege, wieso die Schalker wieder verlieren konnten, wenn sie doch die zweitbeste Passquote der Liga haben.

Da hab ich mich so weit rein gesteigert, dass ich jetzt eine neue Strategie habe, mit der ich bei unserem Bundesligatippspiel zu gewinnen versuche. Auf Statistiken basierend. Meine Hypothese: Aus den vergangenen 6 Spielen kann ich ableiten, wie das kommende Spiel ausgeht. (more…)