Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance: The Tameflow Approach and its Application to Scrum and Kanban

2015 | Business & Finance

By some estimates, knowledge workers outnumber all other workers in North America alone by a four to one margin. Knowledge work and knowledge workers vary with each profession, depending on the industry - from software developers to engineers, architects to pharmaceutical researchers, and so forth. They are usually responsible for exploring and creating ideas, new products, new designs or perhaps new models for doing business to help their organization achieve or maintain a competitive advantage. As much of this type of work is intangible, productivity is a mystery to most business executives, managers and team leaders.This unique reference shows how to lead knowledge workers, manage knowledge work and build a hyper-productive knowledge work organization, by taming and managing the four flows of organizational performance (psychology, information, work and finance) to produce spectacular operational and financial throughput results.Inspired by his experience and knowledge gained at Borland International, where a hyper-productive level of performance was achieved resulting in the most productive software project ever documented, author Steve Tendon devised TameFlow.TameFlow is an approach that can be superimposed on any preexisting process, method, and practice to enable performance improvement by several orders of magnitude and a state of hyper-productivity.

It is adaptable to nearly every industry, and can be applied to any knowledge work domain or organization that generates business value through knowledge.TameFlow blends and merges different ideas from a variety of schools of thought. It is founded in pattern theory and organizational performance patterns which are used to analyze and decompose processes, methodologies, and management practices into constituent parts to observe productivity patterns, and then they are recombined in new configurations to enable hyper-productive levels of performance.In this volume of The TameFlow Hyper-Productivity Series, the TameFlow approach is explained within the context of knowledge work performed in a software development organization. Mr.Tendon teams up with author, Wolfram Muller, a thought-leader and expert in Critical Chain and Advanced Agile Project Management to illustrate its application to Scrum, the most widely used Agile software project management framework, and to Kanban, a method used for knowledge work with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery and change management.The authors demonstrate how constraints management (TOC) can improve Scrum and Kanban in powerful ways, bringing more predictability of behavior of the system as a whole, as well as to the individuals involved.

Their combination becomes a breeding ground for the development of Unity of Purpose and Community of Trust. Both Scrum and Kanban can be extended with features of the TOC, and help create a hyper-productive organization.Key FeaturesReveals a number of practical methods, models, and tools to manage knowledge work, and discusses what needs to be considered from a managerial and organizational perspective to develop a hyper-productive firm capable of delivering superior performanceShows how to shape the information flow between individuals and groups and build an organization's collective intelligence, setting the foundation for the organization's culture, values, and principlesTeaches how to reach a psychological state of flow where individuals or groups achieve high performance levelsDescribes how to master operational flow or the rate at which goods and services are delivered to the marketplaceExplains how to maximize financial flow or the rate at which products or services are turned into positive cash flowDemonstrates, by applying the TameFlow approach, how to overcome typical pitfalls of Scrum and Kanban, and how they can be extended with features of the Theory of Constraints to help create a hyper-productive organizationWAV(TM) offers downloadable spreadsheets to support all necessary functions for TameFlow-Scrum-available from the Web Added Value(TM) Download Resource Center at www.

jrosspub.com

Steve Tendon (Author)

Wolfram Muller (Author)