Zombie Scrum is a term used to describe Agile teams or organizations that superficially adopt Agile practices but lack the vitality, collaboration, and customer-centricity that are the hallmarks of successful Agile implementations. In essence, Zombie Scrum teams go through the motions of Agile but fail to deliver meaningful value or continuous improvement.
Zombie Scrum is akin to the undead creatures of horror lore—still moving, but without a sense of purpose or life. These teams often exhibit symptoms of stagnation, rigid processes, and a lack of enthusiasm or creativity.
The term “Zombie Scrum” gained prominence from the book “Zombie Scrum Survival Guide” by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem. The authors coined the term to draw attention to the pervasiveness of this Agile anti-pattern and to encourage organizations to reevaluate their Agile practices for meaningful impact.
Symptoms of Zombie Scrum
Recognizing the symptoms of Zombie Scrum is essential for early diagnosis and intervention. Here are some common indicators of Zombie Scrum:
1. Lack of Focus on Value
Zombie Scrum teams often prioritize following processes over delivering value to customers. They may spend excessive time on planning, meetings, and documentation without meaningful outcomes.
2. Stagnant Progress
Teams stuck in Zombie Scrum exhibit little to no progress in their work. They may continue to work on the same tasks or projects for extended periods without delivering results.
3. Absence of Collaboration
Effective Agile teams thrive on collaboration, but Zombie Scrum teams often work in isolation. There’s a lack of cross-functional teamwork, communication, and shared responsibility.
4. Rigid Processes
Zombie Scrum teams adhere rigidly to processes and rituals without adapting to changing circumstances. They may treat Agile ceremonies like ceremonies rather than opportunities for collaboration and improvement.
5. Disengaged Team Members
Team members in Zombie Scrum teams may lack enthusiasm, engagement, and a sense of ownership. They go through the motions without a genuine commitment to the Agile mindset.
6. Ineffective Retrospectives
In Agile, retrospectives are essential for continuous improvement. Zombie Scrum teams conduct retrospectives but rarely implement meaningful changes as a result.
7. Little Customer Focus
Zombie Scrum often neglects the end customer. Teams may lose sight of the customer’s needs and prioritize internal processes over customer-centricity.
Causes of Zombie Scrum
Understanding the causes of Zombie Scrum is crucial for devising effective treatment plans. Some common causes include:
1. Misinterpretation of Agile
Organizations may misinterpret Agile as a set of rigid processes to be followed rather than a mindset and set of principles aimed at delivering value and embracing change.
2. Fear of Change
A fear of change can lead to Zombie Scrum. Team members or organizations may resist Agile practices that disrupt existing routines or challenge the status quo.
3. Lack of Coaching and Support
Without proper coaching and support, teams can struggle to adopt Agile practices effectively. Inadequate training and guidance can contribute to Zombie Scrum.
4. Overemphasis on Tools
Relying too heavily on Agile tools and software can lead to a focus on processes and documentation rather than people and collaboration.
5. Lack of Autonomy
Teams that lack autonomy and decision-making power may become passive and disengaged, resulting in Zombie Scrum.
Diagnosing the Impact of Zombie Scrum
The impact of Zombie Scrum extends beyond the team to the organization as a whole. Here are some common consequences of Zombie Scrum:
1. Reduced Productivity
Zombie Scrum teams often suffer from reduced productivity due to a focus on processes and rituals rather than delivering value.
2. Low Morale
Team members in Zombie Scrum teams may experience low morale, leading to disengagement and decreased job satisfaction.
3. Missed Opportunities
Zombie Scrum teams miss opportunities to innovate, adapt to market changes, and respond to customer needs effectively.
4. Customer Dissatisfaction
Due to a lack of customer-centricity, Zombie Scrum teams may fail to deliver products or services that meet customer expectations.
5. Wasted Resources
Investments in Agile training and processes may go to waste if teams remain stuck in Zombie Scrum.
Treating Zombie Scrum
Reanimating Zombie Scrum teams requires a combination of strategies and interventions. Here’s how to treat Zombie Scrum effectively:
1. Agile Coaching
Provide Agile coaching and mentoring to teams and individuals to help them understand and embrace Agile principles.
2. Cultural Shift
Encourage a cultural shift toward embracing change, learning from failures, and focusing on delivering value to customers.
3. Continuous Improvement
Promote a culture of continuous improvement where teams actively seek ways to enhance their processes and outcomes.
4. Customer-Centricity
Reestablish a customer-centric focus by actively engaging with customers, gathering feedback, and prioritizing their needs.
5. Empower Teams
Empower teams by giving them autonomy and decision-making authority. Encourage teams to take ownership of their work and outcomes.
6. Collaboration and Communication
Foster collaboration and open communication within teams and across departments. Encourage cross-functional collaboration and shared responsibilities.
7. Adaptation and Flexibility
Encourage teams to adapt and be flexible in their approaches, embracing change as an opportunity for improvement.
8. Meaningful Retrospectives
Ensure that retrospectives result in meaningful actions and changes. Follow up on action items to drive continuous improvement.
Preventing Zombie Scrum
Preventing Zombie Scrum is preferable to treating it. Here are strategies to prevent Zombie Scrum from taking hold in your organization:
1. Agile Education
Educate teams and stakeholders about Agile principles, values, and practices to ensure a common understanding.
2. Leadership Commitment
Leadership commitment to Agile is crucial. Ensure that leaders actively support and embrace Agile principles.
3. Regular Assessments
Conduct regular assessments and health checks to identify signs of Zombie Scrum early and take corrective actions.
4. Agile Culture
Cultivate an Agile culture that values collaboration, continuous improvement, and customer-centricity.
5. Ongoing Training
Provide ongoing training and professional development opportunities for team members to deepen their Agile knowledge and skills.
Real-World Examples of Overcoming Zombie Scrum
Let’s explore a few real-world examples of organizations that successfully overcame Zombie Sc
rum:
1. Spotify
Spotify, a music streaming service, transformed its organizational structure to embrace Agile principles. It fostered a culture of autonomy, alignment, and continuous improvement, enabling teams to work collaboratively and deliver value rapidly.
2. ING Bank
ING Bank embarked on an Agile transformation journey to revitalize its approach to banking. By empowering cross-functional teams, promoting Agile values, and focusing on customer-centricity, ING achieved greater agility and innovation.
3. The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security
The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security adopted Agile principles to enhance its public service delivery. By embracing Agile practices, including collaboration and customer feedback, the ministry improved its responsiveness and efficiency.
Conclusion
Zombie Scrum is a menacing epidemic that can infect Agile teams and organizations, leading to stagnation, reduced productivity, and a lack of customer focus. Recognizing the symptoms, diagnosing the causes, and implementing effective treatments are essential steps to reanimate and revitalize Agile efforts.
By fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, customer-centricity, and embracing change, teams and organizations can prevent Zombie Scrum from taking hold and ensure that Agile principles and practices thrive. Agile is about more than processes; it’s about embracing a mindset that values adaptability, collaboration, and delivering meaningful value to customers. Don’t let Zombie Scrum infect your Agile journey—take proactive steps to ensure your Agile teams remain vibrant, engaged, and productive.
Key Highlights:
Definition of Zombie Scrum:
Zombie Scrum refers to Agile teams or organizations that superficially adopt Agile practices but lack vitality, collaboration, and customer-centricity, failing to deliver meaningful value or continuous improvement.
Origins and Symptoms:
The term originated from the “Zombie Scrum Survival Guide” and is characterized by symptoms such as lack of focus on value, stagnant progress, absence of collaboration, rigid processes, disengaged team members, ineffective retrospectives, and little customer focus.
Causes and Impact:
Causes include misinterpretation of Agile, fear of change, lack of coaching, overemphasis on tools, and lack of autonomy. Impact includes reduced productivity, low morale, missed opportunities, customer dissatisfaction, and wasted resources.
Treating and Preventing Zombie Scrum:
Treatment involves Agile coaching, cultural shift, continuous improvement, customer-centricity, empowering teams, collaboration, adaptation, flexibility, and meaningful retrospectives. Prevention includes Agile education, leadership commitment, regular assessments, Agile culture, and ongoing training.
Real-World Examples:
Examples of organizations overcoming Zombie Scrum include Spotify, ING Bank, and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, which achieved greater agility, innovation, and customer focus through Agile transformation.
Conclusion:
Zombie Scrum is a threat to Agile effectiveness, but with recognition, diagnosis, and effective treatment, organizations can revitalize their Agile efforts, foster collaboration, continuous improvement, and customer-centricity, ensuring vibrant and productive Agile teams.
Related Framework
Description
When to Apply
Scrum
Scrum is an agile framework for managing and delivering complex projects. It emphasizes iterative development, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Scrum defines roles (e.g., Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team), events (e.g., Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Sprint Review), and artifacts (e.g., Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog) to facilitate project management and delivery.
When managing complex projects with rapidly changing requirements, fostering collaboration among cross-functional teams, and delivering value iteratively through incremental development.
Agile Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto is a set of guiding principles for agile software development. It emphasizes individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. The Agile Manifesto values individuals who can adapt to change and work collaboratively to deliver value.
When developing software or products in environments characterized by uncertainty and change, prioritizing customer collaboration and responding flexibly to evolving requirements and feedback.
Kanban Method
Kanban is a visual management method used to optimize workflow efficiency and improve productivity. It involves visualizing work on a Kanban board, limiting work in progress (WIP), managing flow, making policies explicit, and continuously improving. Kanban helps teams to identify bottlenecks, reduce waste, and deliver value more effectively by visualizing and optimizing their workflow.
When managing workflows and processes in dynamic environments, visualizing work to improve transparency and collaboration, and continuously optimizing processes to enhance efficiency and productivity.
Lean Principles
Lean principles, derived from lean manufacturing, focus on delivering value with minimum waste and maximizing customer satisfaction. Key principles include identifying value from the customer’s perspective, mapping value streams to eliminate waste, creating flow through continuous delivery, implementing pull systems to manage demand, and pursuing perfection through continuous improvement.
When optimizing processes and workflows to reduce waste and increase efficiency, focusing on delivering value from the customer’s perspective, and continuously improving operations to enhance customer satisfaction.
DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to enable faster and more reliable delivery of software. DevOps emphasizes collaboration, automation, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and feedback loops to streamline development and operations processes. DevOps aims to deliver high-quality software faster and more efficiently.
When integrating development and operations teams to streamline software delivery, automating manual processes to improve efficiency, and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement to enhance software quality and reliability.
Agile Coaching
Agile coaching involves guiding individuals and teams through the adoption and implementation of agile principles and practices. Agile coaches support teams in understanding agile frameworks (e.g., Scrum, Kanban), improving collaboration, removing impediments, and embracing an agile mindset. They help organizations transition to agile ways of working and foster a culture of continuous improvement and learning.
When transitioning to agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban, providing guidance and support to teams and individuals, and fostering a culture of collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement to enhance project outcomes.
Lean Startup
The Lean Startup methodology, popularized by Eric Ries, is an approach to building and launching products iteratively. It emphasizes validating ideas through rapid experimentation, learning from customer feedback, and adapting strategies based on validated learning. Lean Startup aims to reduce the risk of failure by iteratively testing hypotheses and pivoting based on market insights.
When launching new products or ventures in uncertain markets, validating assumptions through rapid experimentation and customer feedback, and adapting strategies based on validated learning to minimize risk and maximize success potential.
Product Management
Product Management involves overseeing the development and lifecycle of products from inception to retirement. It encompasses activities such as market research, product planning, prioritization, and delivery. Product Managers collaborate with cross-functional teams to define product vision, strategy, and roadmap, ensuring that products meet customer needs and business objectives.
When managing the development and lifecycle of products, defining product vision and strategy, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver value to customers and achieve business goals.
Agile Testing
Agile Testing is an approach to software testing that aligns with agile principles and practices. It involves integrating testing activities throughout the software development lifecycle, automating test processes, and collaborating closely with developers and stakeholders. Agile testing aims to ensure that software meets quality standards while enabling rapid and iterative delivery.
When conducting testing activities in agile development environments, collaborating closely with development teams and stakeholders, and ensuring that software meets quality standards while enabling rapid delivery.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous Improvement, also known as Kaizen, is a philosophy and practice of making incremental improvements to processes, products, or services over time. It involves identifying opportunities for improvement, implementing changes, measuring results, and iterating on the process. Continuous improvement fosters a culture of innovation, excellence, and adaptability within organizations.
When seeking to improve processes, products, or services over time, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence, and empowering teams to identify and implement incremental improvements to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
AIOps is the application of artificial intelligence to IT operations. It has become particularly useful for modern IT management in hybridized, distributed, and dynamic environments. AIOps has become a key operational component of modern digital-based organizations, built around software and algorithms.
Agile started as a lightweight development method compared to heavyweight software development, which is the core paradigm of the previous decades of software development. By 2001 the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born as a set of principles that defined the new paradigm for software development as a continuous iteration. This would also influence the way of doing business.
Agile Program Management is a means of managing, planning, and coordinating interrelated work in such a way that value delivery is emphasized for all key stakeholders. Agile Program Management (AgilePgM) is a disciplined yet flexible agile approach to managing transformational change within an organization.
Agile project management (APM) is a strategy that breaks large projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. In the APM methodology, each project is completed in small sections – often referred to as iterations. Each iteration is completed according to its project life cycle, beginning with the initial design and progressing to testing and then quality assurance.
Agile Modeling (AM) is a methodology for modeling and documenting software-based systems. Agile Modeling is critical to the rapid and continuous delivery of software. It is a collection of values, principles, and practices that guide effective, lightweight software modeling.
Agile Business Analysis (AgileBA) is certification in the form of guidance and training for business analysts seeking to work in agile environments. To support this shift, AgileBA also helps the business analyst relate Agile projects to a wider organizational mission or strategy. To ensure that analysts have the necessary skills and expertise, AgileBA certification was developed.
Agile leadership is the embodiment of agile manifesto principles by a manager or management team. Agile leadership impacts two important levels of a business. The structural level defines the roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. The behavioral level describes the actions leaders exhibit to others based on agile principles.
The andon system alerts managerial, maintenance, or other staff of a production process problem. The alert itself can be activated manually with a button or pull cord, but it can also be activated automatically by production equipment. Most Andon boards utilize three colored lights similar to a traffic signal: green (no errors), yellow or amber (problem identified, or quality check needed), and red (production stopped due to unidentified issue).
Bimodal Portfolio Management (BimodalPfM) helps an organization manage both agile and traditional portfolios concurrently. Bimodal Portfolio Management – sometimes referred to as bimodal development – was coined by research and advisory company Gartner. The firm argued that many agile organizations still needed to run some aspects of their operations using traditional delivery models.
Business innovation is about creating new opportunities for an organization to reinvent its core offerings, revenue streams, and enhance the value proposition for existing or new customers, thus renewing its whole business model. Business innovation springs by understanding the structure of the market, thus adapting or anticipating those changes.
Business modelinnovation is about increasing the success of an organization with existing products and technologies by crafting a compelling value proposition able to propel a new business model to scale up customers and create a lasting competitive advantage. And it all starts by mastering the key customers.
A consumer brand company like Procter & Gamble (P&G) defines “Constructive Disruption” as: a willingness to change, adapt, and create new trends and technologies that will shape our industry for the future. According to P&G, it moves around four pillars: lean innovation, brand building, supply chain, and digitalization & data analytics.
That is a process that requires a continuous feedback loop to develop a valuable product and build a viable business model. Continuous innovation is a mindset where products and services are designed and delivered to tune them around the customers’ problem and not the technical solution of its founders.
A design sprint is a proven five-day process where critical business questions are answered through speedy design and prototyping, focusing on the end-user. A design sprint starts with a weekly challenge that should finish with a prototype, test at the end, and therefore a lesson learned to be iterated.
Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, defined design thinking as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” Therefore, desirability, feasibility, and viability are balanced to solve critical problems.
DevOps refers to a series of practices performed to perform automated software development processes. It is a conjugation of the term “development” and “operations” to emphasize how functions integrate across IT teams. DevOps strategies promote seamless building, testing, and deployment of products. It aims to bridge a gap between development and operations teams to streamline the development altogether.
Product discovery is a critical part of agile methodologies, as its aim is to ensure that products customers love are built. Product discovery involves learning through a raft of methods, including design thinking, lean start-up, and A/B testing to name a few. Dual Track Agile is an agile methodology containing two separate tracks: the “discovery” track and the “delivery” track.
eXtreme Programming was developed in the late 1990s by Ken Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Ward Cunningham. During this time, the trio was working on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) to help manage the company payroll system. eXtreme Programming (XP) is a software development methodology. It is designed to improve software quality and the ability of software to adapt to changing customer needs.
Feature-Driven Development is a pragmatic software process that is client and architecture-centric. Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is an agile software development model that organizes workflow according to which features need to be developed next.
A Gemba Walk is a fundamental component of lean management. It describes the personal observation of work to learn more about it. Gemba is a Japanese word that loosely translates as “the real place”, or in business, “the place where value is created”. The Gemba Walk as a concept was created by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System of lean manufacturing. Ohno wanted to encourage management executives to leave their offices and see where the real work happened. This, he hoped, would build relationships between employees with vastly different skillsets and build trust.
GIST Planning is a relatively easy and lightweight agile approach to product planning that favors autonomous working. GIST Planning is a lean and agile methodology that was created by former Google product manager Itamar Gilad. GIST Planning seeks to address this situation by creating lightweight plans that are responsive and adaptable to change. GIST Planning also improves team velocity, autonomy, and alignment by reducing the pervasive influence of management. It consists of four blocks: goals, ideas, step-projects, and tasks.
The ICE Scoring Model is an agile methodology that prioritizes features using data according to three components: impact, confidence, and ease of implementation. The ICE Scoring Model was initially created by author and growth expert Sean Ellis to help companies expand. Today, the model is broadly used to prioritize projects, features, initiatives, and rollouts. It is ideally suited for early-stage product development where there is a continuous flow of ideas and momentum must be maintained.
An innovation funnel is a tool or process ensuring only the best ideas are executed. In a metaphorical sense, the funnel screens innovative ideas for viability so that only the best products, processes, or business models are launched to the market. An innovation funnel provides a framework for the screening and testing of innovative ideas for viability.
According to how well defined is the problem and how well defined the domain, we have four main types of innovations: basic research (problem and domain or not well defined); breakthrough innovation (domain is not well defined, the problem is well defined); sustaining innovation (both problem and domain are well defined); and disruptive innovation (domain is well defined, the problem is not well defined).
The innovation loop is a methodology/framework derived from the Bell Labs, which produced innovation at scale throughout the 20th century. They learned how to leverage a hybrid innovation management model based on science, invention, engineering, and manufacturing at scale. By leveraging individual genius, creativity, and small/large groups.
The Agile methodology has been primarily thought of for software development (and other business disciplines have also adopted it). Lean thinking is a process improvement technique where teams prioritize the value streams to improve it continuously. Both methodologies look at the customer as the key driver to improvement and waste reduction. Both methodologies look at improvement as something continuous.
A startup company is a high-tech business that tries to build a scalable business model in tech-driven industries. A startup company usually follows a lean methodology, where continuous innovation, driven by built-in viral loops is the rule. Thus, driving growth and building network effects as a consequence of this strategy.
As pointed out by Eric Ries, a minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort through a cycle of build, measure, learn; that is the foundation of the lean startup methodology.
Kanban is a lean manufacturing framework first developed by Toyota in the late 1940s. The Kanban framework is a means of visualizing work as it moves through identifying potential bottlenecks. It does that through a process called just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing to optimize engineering processes, speed up manufacturing products, and improve the go-to-market strategy.
Jidoka was first used in 1896 by Sakichi Toyoda, who invented a textile loom that would stop automatically when it encountered a defective thread. Jidoka is a Japanese term used in lean manufacturing. The term describes a scenario where machines cease operating without human intervention when a problem or defect is discovered.
The PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle was first proposed by American physicist and engineer Walter A. Shewhart in the 1920s. The PDCA cycle is a continuous process and product improvement method and an essential component of the lean manufacturing philosophy.
RAD was first introduced by author and consultant James Martin in 1991. Martin recognized and then took advantage of the endless malleability of software in designing development models. Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a methodology focusing on delivering rapidly through continuous feedback and frequent iterations.
Retrospective analyses are held after a project to determine what worked well and what did not. They are also conducted at the end of an iteration in Agile project management. Agile practitioners call these meetings retrospectives or retros. They are an effective way to check the pulse of a project team, reflect on the work performed to date, and reach a consensus on how to tackle the next sprint cycle. These are the five stages of a retrospective analysis for effective Agile project management: set the stage, gather the data, generate insights, decide on the next steps, and close the retrospective.
Scaled Agile Lean Development (ScALeD) helps businesses discover a balanced approach to agile transition and scaling questions. The ScALed approach helps businesses successfully respond to change. Inspired by a combination of lean and agile values, ScALed is practitioner-based and can be completed through various agile frameworks and practices.
The SMED (single minute exchange of die) method is a lean production framework to reduce waste and increase production efficiency. The SMED method is a framework for reducing the time associated with completing an equipment changeover.
The Spotify Model is an autonomous approach to scaling agile, focusing on culture communication, accountability, and quality. The Spotify model was first recognized in 2012 after Henrik Kniberg, and Anders Ivarsson released a white paper detailing how streaming company Spotify approached agility. Therefore, the Spotify model represents an evolution of agile.
As the name suggests, TDD is a test-driven technique for delivering high-quality software rapidly and sustainably. It is an iterative approach based on the idea that a failing test should be written before any code for a feature or function is written. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an approach to software development that relies on very short development cycles.
Timeboxing is a simple yet powerful time-management technique for improving productivity. Timeboxing describes the process of proactively scheduling a block of time to spend on a task in the future. It was first described by author James Martin in a book about agile software development.
Scrum is a methodology co-created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland for effective team collaboration on complex products. Scrum was primarily thought for software development projects to deliver new software capability every 2-4 weeks. It is a sub-group of agile also used in project management to improve startups’ productivity.
Scrumban is a project management framework that is a hybrid of two popular agile methodologies: Scrum and Kanban. Scrumban is a popular approach to helping businesses focus on the right strategic tasks while simultaneously strengthening their processes.
Scrum anti-patterns describe any attractive, easy-to-implement solution that ultimately makes a problem worse. Therefore, these are the practice not to follow to prevent issues from emerging. Some classic examples of scrum anti-patterns comprise absent product owners, pre-assigned tickets (making individuals work in isolation), and discounting retrospectives (where review meetings are not useful to really make improvements).
Scrum at Scale (Scrum@Scale) is a framework that Scrum teams use to address complex problems and deliver high-value products. Scrum at Scale was created through a joint venture between the Scrum Alliance and Scrum Inc. The joint venture was overseen by Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of Scrum and one of the principal authors of the Agile Manifesto.
Six Sigma is a data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating errors or defects in a product, service, or process. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola as a management approach based on quality fundamentals in the early 1980s. A decade later, it was popularized by General Electric who estimated that the methodology saved them $12 billion in the first five years of operation.
Stretch objectives describe any task an agile team plans to complete without expressly committing to do so. Teams incorporate stretch objectives during a Sprint or Program Increment (PI) as part of Scaled Agile. They are used when the agile team is unsure of its capacity to attain an objective. Therefore, stretch objectives are instead outcomes that, while extremely desirable, are not the difference between the success or failure of each sprint.
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is an early form of lean manufacturing created by auto-manufacturer Toyota. Created by the Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1940s and 50s, the Toyota Production System seeks to manufacture vehicles ordered by customers most quickly and efficiently possible.
The Total Quality Management (TQM) framework is a technique based on the premise that employees continuously work on their ability to provide value to customers. Importantly, the word “total” means that all employees are involved in the process – regardless of whether they work in development, production, or fulfillment.
The waterfall model was first described by Herbert D. Benington in 1956 during a presentation about the software used in radar imaging during the Cold War. Since there were no knowledge-based, creative software development strategies at the time, the waterfall method became standard practice. The waterfall model is a linear and sequential project management framework.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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