Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance

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 , 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.

Steve Tendon, creator of the TameFlow management approach, is a senior, multilingual, executive management consultant, experienced at leading and directing multinational and distributed knowledge-work organizations. He is an expert in organizational performance transformation programs. Mr. Tendon is a sought-after adviser, coach, mentor and consultant, as well as author and speaker, specializing in organizational productivity, organizational design, process excellence and process innovation. Steve helps businesses create high-performance organizations and teams and holds a MSc. in Software Project Management from the University of Aberdeen. Mr. Tendon has published numerous articles and is a contributing author to Agility Across Time and Space: Implementing Agile Methods in Global Software Projects. Steve is currently a Director at TameFlow Consulting Ltd, where he helps clients achieve outstanding organizational performance by applying the theories and practices described in this book. Mr. Tendon has held senior Software Engineering Management roles at various firms over the course of his career, including the role of Technical Director for the Italian branch of Borland International, the birthplace of hyper-productivity in software development. Borland's development of Quattro Pro for Windows remains the most productive software project ever documented. This case was Mr. Tendon's source of inspiration that led to his development of the TameFlow perspective and management approach. Wolfram Muller, thought-leader and expert in Critical Chain and Advanced Agile Project Management, is CEO of Speed4Projects, and Director of Sales and Senior Consultant for VISTEM GmbH & Co. KG. Wolfram's formal education is in Mechatronics and Mechanical Engineering, which he gained from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Hochschule Karlsruhe - Technik und Wirtschaft in Germany. Early in his career, Wolfram was developer and project manager for BARD/angiomed, and gained first-hand experience in the development and manufacturing of medical devices. At this time, he learned how the tools of the traditional project management work and about their drawbacks. From 2000 to 2010 he worked for 1&1 Internet AG. He began as a developer and later was made Head of their Project Office, and was responsible for more than 500 projects. He used ideas from the Lean, Critical Chain, Theory of Constraints (TOC), and Agile realms to achieve success. Based on this, he developed add-ons to Agile methods to make them compatible with Critical Chain, an approach to project management based on TOC concepts. His focus is always on speed, throughput, reliability and agility. Mr. Müller has published numerous articles, is co-author of the book The CIOs Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance, and a professional speaker.