Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance

Book excerpt: “Reading Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance has influenced my thinking more than any other recent book I have read about how to transform my company’s culture to achieve higher levels of productivity. It’s like the perfect mix of Fred Brooks, W. Edwards Deming, Donald Reinertsen, David Anderson, and Jeff Sutherland all rolled into one approachable and pragmatic book. I recognized a lot of what I already knew and then was pleasantly surprised with how the authors used hyper-productivity to show how it all interconnected. All in all, it is an eye opening book that provides a concrete path to hyper-productivity.” —Curt Hibbs, Chief Agile Evangelist, Boeing 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 Müller, 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.