Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance: The TameFlow Approach and Its Application to Scrum and Kanban

by Steve Tendon, Wolfram Muller

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.

Genres: Business

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 2015

Reviews

[Sicofonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance is divided in two parts. The first part is about explaining the main principles and patterns conducive to hyper-productive organizations. The second part is dedicated to explaining the TameFlow Approach. The main idea behind the TameFlow Approach revolves around using the Theory of Constraints as a way to systematically find, exploit and raise the bottleneck in a value stream.
Steve Tendon borrowed a lot from a very comprehensive bibliography, and anybody wanting to delve deeper in many of the topics covered can find resources where to go to.
There is a couple of bad points for me:
* Some of the content is already available online, especially on Mr. Tendon's blog. That doesn't justify the price J Ross is charging you for the book in my eyes.
* In some chapters, certain graphs are described but they are on the next page or two so as you're reading you have to flip back and forth between pages which makes reading a bit slow.

All in all, Steven Tendon seems to know what he is talking about and he can back it up with a sound bibliography. There is also a couple of spreadsheets available for those who want to get started with TameFlow.

This review was really a shallow and quick one that I've done. I plan to come back and edit this once I try TameFlow by myself to share my findings.

[Hendrick Mcdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good 👍🏽

A nice overview of Kanban mixed with the theory of constraints / drum buffer rope ( DBR ) style productivity system.