The Curious Cat Management blog carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• The 7 Software Development Wastes by Jack Milunsky – “1) Keep your stories small, and unambiguous. 2) Ensure that each story has well defined acceptance test criteria (assisted by input from the customer). 3) Ensure that your code is well tested. Adopting good Test Driven Development habits will pay back in spades…”
• Strengths, Weaknesses, Your Team, and You – “Help your people be more successful by helping them develop their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant. Help your team be more successful by developing the most effective mix of task assignments.”
• Plan Vs. Actual – The Swiss Army Knife of Charts by Mark R. Hamel – “The plan vs. actual also spurs PDCA in that the worker is required to identify the root cause of the abnormal condition and ultimately points the worker, team and leadership to effective countermeasures.”
• Don’t build a roofless home: 3 steps to successfully implementing Counter Measures by JC Gatlin – “Set up a ‘PDCA Implementation Review’ with the entire PDCA group one or two days following the final TARGET date. This should be a simple, short conference call – no more than 15 minutes.”
• How Google sets goals and measures success by Don Dodge – “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary – Setting impossible goals and achieving part of them sets you on a completely different path than the safe route. Sometimes you can achieve the impossible in a quarter, but even when you don’t, you are on a fast track to achieving it soon”
• Creating Employee Engagement, Part 4 by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Team members must be able to engage in brainstorming, experimentation, and communication to be able to develop, share, and decide on solutions to problems… Skills make this succeed or fail.

(more…)

Toyota’s journey from Waterfall to Lean software development by Henrik Kniberg

via: Justin Hunter

Related: Toyota IT Overview – Toyota Canada CIO on Genchi Genbutsu and Kaizen – Lean Software Development – My First Trip to Japan by Peter Scholtes – Toyota IT for Kaizen

Bill George is professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School and former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, the world’s leading medical technology company. Under his leadership, Medtronic’s market capitalization grew from $1.1 billion to $60 billion, averaging 35 percent a year. He is the author of the best-selling Authentic Leadership and a board member of Goldman Sachs, Target, and Novartis.

His board membership at Goldman Sachs certainly leaves him with something to answer for (which I don’t think he does in this webcast). With the damage that company has done to the USA economy you certainly can’t excuse a board member of responsibility for the actions that company has taken. You can listed to his first few minutes and don’t get the idea that he was a leader of the company most responsible for the credit crisis.

His words do sound nice but seem a bit short on much new. Lots of the “new leadership ideas” (like today you can’t have one leader that everyone follows – isn’t that at least 20 years old as a well know bad idea?). Also the idea that an organization exists to provide value to customers not to maximize shareholder value. I understand more people do not understand this point, so it is nice a Harvard MBA professor is pushing this idea (but again it isn’t new at all).

I guess I am a little disappointed in the video but others seem to like it and I do think he makes worthwhile points, just nothing really special (from where I sit). I did like how he discussed value tests come in real life.

I share what seemed to be his opinion that talking abstractly about values is less important than actions you take in the real world. I must admit I am getting more and more frustrated in the lack of moral and ethical values in those with power in our society (this is my feeling, not the speakers). And I do not have must patience for their ability to try to explain away their unethical behavior. I repeatedly see our lack of accountability of those with power (just look at how many people are in jail for all the hundreds of billions of financial fraud in the last few year (what maybe 5 people? 10?) and compare that to those in jail for much much less damaging crimes that have less power). His blog has some posts worth reading.

Related: Jeff Bezos Spends a Week Working in Amazon�s Kentucky Distribution Center – Harvard�s Masters of the Apocalypse – An Introduction to Deming�s Management Ideas by Peter Scholtes (webcast) – Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Looting: Bankruptcy for Profit

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival provides links to recent articles to help managers improve the performance of their organization.

• A Mindless Worker is a Happy Worker “when people are given a chance to participate in creating something good, solving a problem, and play a role in adding value through the use of their mind, hands, and heart, good things happen.”
• Creating a Culture of Process Improvement by Rip Stauffer – “If you listen and act, you’ll soon find that you can’t keep up with the suggestions for improvement. That will be the beginning of changing the culture to one of improvement.”
• Creating Employee Engagement by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Organizations will often want people engaged and even teach them some skills to get them engaged, but fall short of creating a mechanism that actually enables this.”
• Why do we spend so much time putting out fires? by Dan Markovitz – “The process keeps everyone up to date on where things stand throughout the organization � no tedious, long-winded, meanderings in the 60 minute weekly (or god help you, 90 minute monthly) meeting.”
• 5 Reasons Why Agile Development Must Be Driven from the Top by Kelly Waters – “Another key concept of agile software development is co-location. Ideally the whole team will all be located in the same place – not just the same office but literally sitting side by side in the same room or space.”
• Counter Measures: Bringing balance to the process by JC Gatlin – “A Temporary Counter Measure is ‘immediate containment.’ This is an action or series of actions that the PDCA group will take to temporarily remedy the problem. This action may have no connection to the root causes.”
• Testing in the Data Center (Manufacturing No More) by James A. Whittaker – “This is the challenge of the new century of software. It’s not a process of get-it-as-reliable-as-possible-before-we-ship. It’s health care, cradle to grave health care … prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure.”

(more…)

Automated software testing is a mistake proofing (poka-yoke) solution for software development.

The way automated testing works is that software code is written that tests the software code of the application. This automated testing code test that business rules are correctly being followed by the code in the application.

So for example, a user should not be able to create a new account without entering password. Then you create code that does not allow an account to be created without a password. And you write a test that passes if this is true and fails if it is false.

The best implementation will then not allow deploying code to your production environment until the code has passed all the automated tests. So if a software developer changes the code, the automated tests are all run and if there is an error noted by the automated testing the code cannot be deployed to the production environment. So, in the example above, if somehow the changes made to the application code somehow now let an account be created without a password the test would fail, and the developer would know to fix the problem before putting the code into production.

Thus automated testing mistake proofs the process. Now the mistake proofing is only as good as the test that are added. Software development is complex and if the code has an error (based on the business rules) that is not tested then the code can be deployed to production and affect customers. But it is a huge help in preventing many errors from affecting customers.

It seems pretty obvious but until the widespread adoption of agile software development techniques and frameworks that make it easy to adopt automated testing (like Ruby on Rails) this sensible process improvement tool was used far less often than you would think.

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Metrics and Software Development – Checklists in Software Development – Google testing blog – Hexawise software testing blog

This interview with David Langford discusses how to improve education using ideas from Deming. Along with Alfie Kohn, David have long been the learning and management experts I find most valuable.

I have long remembered is his idea that he was the CEO of his classroom. On hearing Deming discuss how critical it was to have the CEO active in a management improvement effort to achieve success he tried to get those above him in the organization chart to change. Which didn’t work very well. Seeing that method was not successful he took a new look and decided to view the problem in a different way.

He looked for what he was in charge of and decided he could decide how to run his classroom. I think this is a very valuable idea for anyone looking to improve their organization. What is your sphere of control? Focus on how you can improve there. Don’t just try to change others. See how you can change and improve what you can.

The interview provides a good insight into the great ideas David has.

• “Make changes that let all kids get good grades.”
• That comes from the theory (incorrect theory) grades motivate students.
• There is no level of education sub-quality that is acceptable. Success or need to work more, which category are you in. B, C, D does not make sense.
• People keep trying things we have proven over and over again don’t work, like pay for performance schemes for individual teachers.

Anyone interested in improving education should listen to this interview and search out more ideas from David Langford and Alfie Kohn. I really like David’s capacity matrix.

Related: Orchestrating Learning With Quality by David P. Langford and Barbara A. Cleary – K-12 Educational Reform – Deming on being Destroyed by Best Efforts

The Curious Cat Management Improvement blog carnival provides links to recent blog posts for those interesting in improving management of organizations.

• Leader Standard Work Should Be…Work! by Mark Hamel – “A lean leader’s standard work, among other things, may require him to check a particular work cell once in the morning and once in the afternoon to ensure that the workers are maintaining their plan vs. actual chart (usually by hour), and that specific and meaningful reasons for any shortfalls are documented.”
• Innovations in innovation by Karen Wilhelm – “Innovation, for example, is hampered by patent processes and the extensive litigation often rising around them… These models all seem to fit into the emerging philosophy of Open Innovation growing out of the open-source software movement.”
• “Single Piece Flow” in Medicine by Mark Graban – “They could have done it at the doctor’s office at the same time as the EKG, but the insurance company won’t pay for it there, so she has to take this afternoon off to go to the hospital instead.”
• A different view of leadership by Glyn Lumley – “1) Thinking and acting systemically 2) People are the route to performance 3) Achieving through impact on others”
• Identifying the Root Cause by JC Gatlin – “By taking systematic steps to get to the root cause of a problem, the trouble shooter should be able to avoid assumptions and logic traps to keep the problem from recurring in the future.”
• The Emerging Importance of Nemawashi by Connor Shea – “it’s about aligning individuals to see the whole picture, share a disgust with the actual, and agree to a standard / standard process to close the gap.”

(more…)

How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews? by Bob Sutton

Related: The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer – Deming and Performance Appraisal – Performance Appraisals, Good Execution is not the Solution?

“After a certain basic point, which translates, more or less, to just a few thousand dollars above the minimum poverty level, increases in material well being don’t see to affect how happy people are.”

The speech includes, the first purpose of incorporation at Sony:

To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.

Excellent books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1991. People enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction.
Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1997. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders to poets and artists, the author uses his famous “flow” theory to explain the creative process.

Related: Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity – posts on psychology Interviews with Innovators – Innovation Strategy – The Purpose of an Organization – Flow

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights management blog posts 3 times each month. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• Three Surprises About Change by Chip and Dan Health (this is actually the full text of the first chapter of their new book, Switch, they wrote the great Made to Stick previously) – “we don’t promise that we’re going to make change easy, but at least we can make it easier. Our goal is to teach you a framework, based on decades of scientific research, that is simple enough to remember and flexible enough to use in many different situations—family, work, community, and otherwise.”
• The Switch to Kanban – “By limiting the work in progress rather than limiting the work per time Kanban presented a viable alternative we felt better reflected how we actually work, while preserving the discipline necessary to deliver working software multiple times a week.”
• Not Going Away by Lee Fried – “changes in behavior throughout management, discipline to not stray far from the principles for too long and most importantly each and every employee needs to have meaningful and direct involvement in improving their own work.”
• Obvious and Underutilized by Kevin Meyer – “How often do we look for a complex solution to what is really a simple problem? Spend a few million on nightmarish ERP software instead of mapping and improving a process to remove complex flows and massive WIP, which will usually show how simple good manufacturing really is”
• How do you check that you are engaging people? by Bruce Baker – “I take suggestions that recommend fairly specific countermeasures as a sign of higher engagement. When small groups or individuals work really thorough ‘plan phases’ autonomously I take it a sign that they are ‘in the game.’”
• Designing a kanban board – not as simple as you might think by Adam Shone – “Needless to say, this all came out during our first sprint retrospective and our kanban boards have evolved since that first attempt. But it taught me something – you might think that you can draw out your workflow with your eyes closed, but how closely does your theory match reality?”

(more…)

Buffett’s New CEO Shows Analysts, Hedge-Fund Managers to Door

Decades ago Dr. Deming said short term focus was one of the seven deadly diseases of western management. Unfortunately we have made very little progress on the deadly diseases. The failed, health care system with it’s focus on a few special interests fighting to keep the broken system that does great harm to society but benefits the special interests is another a disease that has definitely gotten much worse.

Related: Think Long Term Act Daily – posts related to Warren Buffett – Goodbye Quarterly Targets – A Great Day for Georgia-Pacific

Since 2006 the Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has provided links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management especially focused on the ideas of Deming, Ohno, Ackoff, Scholtes, McGregor, Womack, Christensen…

• Putting the Checklist Manifesto to Work by Wally Bock – “Checklists are simple but powerful tools that can help you improve performance without improving either skill or abilities. Use them to take a load off your memory, assure consistent process performance, and remain calm in a crisis.”
• The Role of Purpose and Your Role by Mark Graban – “Are you just laying bricks or are you building a cathedral? You want people to understand their purpose, not just their job description or the tasks that are assigned to them. This is very similar to Jim Womack’s ‘Purpose, Process, People’ model. Your ‘role’ (what you are responsible for) is more than your task assignments” [great post - John]
• Stretch, Don’t Break – 5 ways to grow your people by Mark Hamel – “Make people think. Don’t give people the answers. Help guide and challenge them to apply PDCA thinking – to become experimentalists. This means that people will often fail. Lean leaders must see these failures as learning opportunities.”
• Measurement Misnomers, and Toyota Dealership Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Any time a measurement is tied to an incentive, then it is likely to be manipulated at some level… Metrics are abstractions, by definition. That means they never truly represent reality… Don’t throw out your measurements. Just know that they don’t give you the whole story. Take the time to understand the current state as it actually happens, through direct observation.”
• Suddenly, Deming is Relevant Again by Art Petty – “I’m also critically concerned about learning from the past and understanding the wisdom of those that came before us. We’ve not yet moved beyond the flaws and failings that Deming saw clearly in the management practices of the industrial revolution. ” [I agree, John - ]
• It’s not a promise, it’s a guess by David Heinemeier Hansson – “Software development is inherently unpredictable… That’s the true value of estimates. That it sets up conversational constraints that can be used as boundaries for trading concessions.”

(more…)

Lay Off the Layoffs by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Related: Five Managerial Fallacies Concerning Layoffs – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer – Cutting Hours Instead of People – Firing Workers Isn’t Fixing Problems

In, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey discusses the circle of control, circle of influence and circle of concern. This provides a good framework from which to view issues as you look for improvement strategies.

Within your circle of control you have much more autonomy and have less need to win others over to your plan. However, in practice, even here, you benefit from winning over those who are involved (for example you are their boss).

Our circle of concern covers those things we worry about. Often, we believe because we worry we should find solutions. Problems that fall into this category (but outside our circle of influence) however often prove difficult to tackle. And often people don’t understand why they get frustrated in this case. You can save your energy for more productive activities by seeing some things are outside your influence and avoid wasting your energy on them.

A problem with this, I see in practice however, is that if you are creative many things that people think are beyond their influence are not. With some imagination you can find ways to have influence. Good ideas are powerful. And often that is all that is needed for influence is offering a good idea.

Understanding to what extent an issue is within your control or influence can help a great deal in determining good strategies. Where you have a good chance to influence the process you can focus on strategies that may require much more of your participation to be successfully adopted. As you have less influence such a strategy is likely a poor one.

You should remember, that there is a temporal component to your circle of influence. On some current issue, I may have a very low chance of success for getting the organization to adopt an improvement I think is best. But certain actions can build the understanding that will allow me later to have more influence. This can even be completely separate from how people normally think of circle of influence. By building an organization that moves toward data based decision making and therefore reduces HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) decision making I increase my ability to influence decision making in the future.

Long term thinking is a very powerful, and much under-practiced, strategy. Your influence within an organization is limited today but has great potential to expand, if you act wisely.

Thinking about the extent a current issue falls within your sphere of influence is important it determining the best strategies. But the most valuable insight is to understand how import your sphere of influence is. It determines what strategies you can pursue. And building your sphere of influence should be part of your decision making process.

By taking the long view you can put yourself in good positions to have influence on decisions. There are many ways to do this. My preferred method is fairly boring. Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems. They will be inclined to listen to your ideas. Provide people useful management tools and help them apply them successfully. Help get people, that you know are good, opportunities to succeed. Often this gains you two allies (the person you helped gain the opportunity for and the person that was looking for someone to step in). Work hard and deliver what is important. It isn’t some secret sauce for quick success but if you make those around you successful you grow your circle of influence.

Related: How to Improve – Helping Employees Improve – Operational Excellence – Management Advice Failures – Management Improvement

Some interesting thoughts from a new Google engineer, Things I’ve learned at Google so far

I think he overestimates the lack of central planning, still it is another interesting view of Google.

Related: Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Google: Ten Golden Rules – The Myth of the Genius Programmer

Slogans mainly are bad. But like most things they can be used in ways that help or hurt. The main problem is when they substitute for a method to achieve the aim (most of the time). If the slogan serves like a mission statement to focus people on something useful to focus on and it is one minor part of a system to achieve a result it can be fine and even useful.

The issue, to me, is not so much that slogans are innately horrible. It is that, in practice, slogan are used in harmful ways most often (especially outside of sports). They tend to substitute for system improvement. The main work of shifting psychology (we do expect to win now, we do expect a focus on reducing bugs in our code…) after years of creating a different culture has to be in changing methods, priorities, values… Slogans, if done right, can be a way of focusing on the change. Or they can be a real reminder of values. But the slogan only provides value as part of a system confirming the aim they emphasis.

Unfortunately, they also to be used as a way to focus criticisms on individuals. Don’t you know/care that our slogan says zero defects? Can’t you read? Jeez, I even put up a huge poster with our slogan saying zero defects and you can’t even do what it says in this beautiful poster? Well, I will give you a bad performance review now, you can’t say you don’t have that coming after you failed to do what our slogan told you to do.

A slogan by itself has negative value. Take any wonderful slogan and move it somewhere else it will do more harm than good. As a minor part of a system though it can tap into how we people think and act (psychology) and provide value. Be careful though, it is much easier to do harm with slogans than to provide value.

If the slogan emphasizes what is being practiced every day, it can be a helpful reinforcer. If it conflicts with what is done every day it breeds cynicism and shows disrespect for people. This which is a huge problem. And managers have to know it is very easy for people to see the lack of cloths on the emperor slogan. Dilbert does a great job showing the risks of using slogans. Those you are targeting the slogan to are more likely to think like Dilbert than the they are to think like the pointy haired boss (and if you are the one pushing the slogan that means you are well on your way to being the phb – so be careful).

Slogans clearly fall under Deming’s understanding psychology area of management. To use them effectively you need to make sure the value provided, exceeds the cost and risk. I see no better way to evaluate slogans than through the lens of Deming’s system of management, interdependent components of: psychology, systems thinking, understanding variation and theory of knowledge. If the slogan is not supported by they system of management in place it will do harm.

In response to: Are Slogans Always Bad or Can They Inspire?

Related: Deming on eliminating slogans and motivational posters – Eliminate Slogans – Toyota Targets 50% Reduction in Maintenance Waste – posts on psychology – How to Improve – Stop Demotivating Employees

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival provides links to recent articles to help managers improve the performance organization.

• Lean in Sweden: Tools < Thinking by Mark Graban – “Tools have some value, but only in context of lean thinking and the lean management philosophy. Tools aren’t value-less, but thinking is better.”
• Manufacturing starts to come home by Dan Markovitz – “NCR sees domestic manufacturing as key to increasing sales as well. It enables them to make higher value-added products that their customers want.”
• Correlation or Causation? Interceptions and the Playoffs by Jeff Hajek – “this is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. If this data truly was a cause and effect relationship, meaning interceptions caused losses, fixing the problem would be simple… If you never threw the ball, you could win nearly four out of five times.”
• Learning from Toyota’s Stumble by Steven Spear – “But as we are now sadly seeing, the capacity for developing people can be overstretched. It was not recognizing this and succumbing to the temptation to make growth its first priority that led to Toyota’s current problems.”
• When in doubt, timebox it by Mark Imbriaco – “If we can solve the compatibility problems in those 30 minutes, it will be a nice win and we can make use of the plugin that we want to. On the flip side, we already have a known solution to the problem.”
• Be Proactive – Prevent your problems! by Sonja Hughes – “Monitoring process performance through statistical process control or other performance measures allows us to detect changes or trends so we can take appropriate action before problems occur.”

(more…)

Gipsie B. Ranney has a great new article – The Trouble with Incentives: They Work

She sums it up very well:

Find more articles on management improvement in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library, including: An Interim Report on Motivation in the Workplace by Gipsie Ranney, Remembering NUMMI by Gipsie Ranney and Improving Problem Solving by Ian Bradbury and Gipsie Ranney.

When you can’t prevent arbitrary targets and rewards based on meeting them the strategy I attempt to put in place is figure out how the system will be distorted in order to meet those targets and then put in measures that will discourage such distortions. It isn’t perfect but can help prevent some of the worst distortions (and degradation of system-wide performance they cause).

Related: Righter Incentivization – The Defect Black Market – Dr. Deming on the problems with managing with targets (and incentives based on them) – Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity

The practice of stopping (either the machine automatically detecting a problem and stopping or a person stopping) the line when a problem is detected is part of Jidoka. Jidoka is also highlighting and making problems visible. Jidoka and Just in Time are the two pillars of the Toyota Production System. Today Toyota practiced Jidoka on a large scale: Toyota Halts Sales of Eight Models After Recall

My guess is there are quite a few people in Toyota that are getting a frustrated that they continue to have problems that they have been unable to successfully address. This strikes is as the kind of action initiated near the top of the organization chart to remind the organization that problems must be addressed immediately. It is not ok to continue business as usually when problems have not been addressed in the Toyota Production System. Toyota is capable of failing to live up to the principles of lean manufacturing. But they also seem to understand this risk and continue to strive to improve. To succeed though they need to improve results – intentions alone are not enough.

Related: Cease Mass Inspection for Quality – Recalls at Toyota and Sony – Reacting to Product Problems – Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno

This is an interesting video on Deming and American management (by the BBC in 1992): Prophet Unheard. It includes some nice old footage of Deming in Japan. The importance of respect for people is clear and the video also touches on the idea the danger of relying on data (when you do not understand variation and that many important matters and unmeasurable). The video features many snippets of Dr. Deming speaking and includes Don Peterson, Ford CEO; Clare Crawford Mason, If Japan Can, Why Can’t We producer; and Myron Tribus.

Related: Dr. Deming Webcast on the 5 Deadly Diseases – Red Bead Experiment Webcast – Performance without Appraisal – management webcasts

Part two of the documentary explores the Deming Prize, understanding data and the PDSA cycle:
(more…)