|
|
|
|
|
|
The Curious Cat Management Improvement site includes a wide array of resources for management professionals (and has been growing and improving, I hope, since 1996). Our calendar now includes several interesting opportunities including Performance Measures and Statistics Workshop in Richland, Washington, USA by Stephen Prevette. This workshop looks interesting. We have mentioned the presenter in previous posts.
Our management improvement job board currently lists jobs including: Six Sigma/Technical Specialist, Supply Chain Project Manager (Google), Quality Control Specialist (Toyota) and Quality Engineer. The service is free, both to those posting and those responding to jobs. If you are looking to fill a management improvement position or for a position please give it a try.
In addition to the blog we also offer an links to hundreds of articles on management topics we have selected, a dictionary of management terms, annotated directory to management resources and recommened management books.
Please let us know what you like and what we could improve.
A recent report from the Brookings Institution, Reconnecting Massachusetts Gateway Cities, has some good words on the efforts of Fort Wayne, Indiana:
In this time, Fort Wayne’s first-in-the nation municipal foray into Six Sigma practices has proven that statistical analyses and stringent quality control standards do not lose their power outside the boardroom. Such data-centric attention to detail, in fact, is making all the difference.
Related: Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin (pdf) - Public Sector Management - Lean Government - Quality Best Practices in Government (pdf) - Six sigma management resources
The Scott County Way by Jillian Ogawa:
Center for Quality People and Organizations:
Great. The Education area does require special care but management improvement concepts can work very well in education. David Langford has done some great work in this area as has Alfie Kohn. They are not focused on the Toyota Way but their principles and lean thinking go together well and there expertise in the education area is very important.
via: Scott County Schools Trying Out the Toyota Way
Related: K-12 (kindergarten though high school) improvement resources - articles on quality education - posts on Toyota management methods - quality learning books
I commented on a post on Evolving Excellence that Jim Jubak is a wall street guy who has good ideas. He has posted another good article: Firing workers isn’t fixing problems
Right. Wall street is not incapable of seeing past short term “thinking.” Even if many on wall street can’t seem to understand. I am far from convinced short term thinking is Wall Street’s fault, it seems to me many executives have this problem and blame “Wall Street.” I believe short term thinking is mainly management’s fault.
Short term thinking is part of the management system. Exorbinant executive pay exacerbates the problem. A failure to understand variation exacerbates the problem. (more…)
Dell has been taking some interesting actions recently. Several months ago they started blogging and interacting with bloggers. Those steps have been interesting since few other companies of their size have taken such action (nothing amazing, but seem much beyond the common corporate, totally out of touch attempts to adopt new technology - they seemed to be committed to actually try to learn about interactive web thinking).
They recently created IdeaStorm to Turn Up the Volume of Customer Voice (quite an innovative attempt at customer focus). There are issues with the method they are using, but innovation is about trying to find new ways of doing things there often are questions about the new methods. The simple view is they are using the a tool of the social web (Digg, Reddit) to discover what the users of IdeaStorm want from Dell (obviously this is only a subset of Dell potential customers - and a small one I would imagine). Essentially users can post ideas and then others promote those they support.
Dell has now announced some actions they are taking based on the results thusfar.
(more…)
Lean for Software: Interview with Mary Poppendieck:
New book - Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.
Related: Competing On The Basis Of Speed (webcast) - Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal
Related: New Toyota CEO’s Views - Why Toyota Is Afraid Of Being Number One - Interview with Toyota President - Could Toyota Fix GM - TPS - Take 2
Here is an excellent article from 1999: Transformation and Redesign at the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) (pdf link) by March Laree Jacques
The article is informative and interesting, enjoy. A couple years after this article I I went to work for Gerald Suarez at the White House Military Office (WHMO). WHCA is one of seven operational units of WHMO, others include: Air Force One, Camp David and the White House Medical Unit.
See more management improvement articles including in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library.
Related: articles and podcasts by Russel Ackoff - Deming on Management - Deming related blog posts - Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site
Saving money by thinking creativity and leanly. $10 wok keeps TV station on air:
45 South volunteer Ken Jones designed the wok transmitter in his spare time last year when he wanted to provide wireless broadband to his Ardgowan home. “A group of us wanted to connect our computers to each other and then we worked out a way to get of getting the signal between two points,” he said.
“The $20,000 for a commercial link was just money we didn’t have, so we bought several woks from The Warehouse instead which was convenient and cheap,” he said. Pre-recorded clips at the studio are fed through a computer and beamed to Cape Wanbrow where they are relayed off to television sets around North Otago.
Related: Why Fix the Escalator? - Toyota Shops At Wal-Mart
Appraising the Performance Of Performance Appraisals by Harry Goldstein:
According to Jenkins and Coens, all of the above can be done better and far less painfully by untangling these functions and designing a process for each. First, they argue, companies should decouple compensation decisions from feedback about how the employee is doing. The point is that outside, or extrinsic, motivators such as money do not really work for the vast majority of employees.
One company that found that to be true is Brighton, Mich.-based Peaker Services, which rebuilds locomotive diesel engines and does application engineering work for control systems. In the past, Peaker relied on merit raises linked to annual evaluations, according to president Ian Bradbury.
Related: Deming on Management: Performance Appraisal - Righter Performance Appraisal - Performance Appraisal Problems - Eric Christiansen Podcast - Performance Without Appraisal - Performance Appraisal Alternative - So What’s System[s] Thinking by Ian Bradbury (pdf)
Once again Joel Spolsky spins a great post with, Seven steps to remarkable customer service. Read it.
This idea is powerful yet ignored by most companies. Management must look at the best way to improve the entire system not to lower the cost per support call.
Related: Customer Service is Important - Ritz Carlton and Home Depot - Quality Customer Focus - Management Training Program - posts on Spolsky
via NY Times Magazine on Toyota, a very good article: From 0 to 60 to World Domination
I don’t think so, that is an example of their medium term thinking. Personal Robot Aids, biotechnology, housing and environmental development - that is long term thinking. More on Non-Automotive Toyota.
Exactly, they have a system of management. Related: Systemic Thinking - Excessive CEO Pay - Lean is Harmony - Purpose of an Organization - Ackoff, Idealized Design and Bell Labs
via: Free Clay Christensen, MIT Sloan Management Review, Article - Finding the Right Job for Your Product by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Gerald Berstell and Denise Nitterhouse (available online for a limited time only). The article has a very simple point. Customers buy your product or service to fill some specific need or desire. Knowing what need the customer is filling can help you improve your offering. Knowing what job the customer is using your product for lets you focus on improving your product for that market. The article provides several examples.
The basic idea is familiar: customer focus, specifically see how your customers uses your product (there might well be several market segments that use your products in different ways - to do different jobs in the words of the article).
Related: articles by Clayton Christensen - Customer Un-focus - What Could we do Better? - Genchi Genbutsu is the lean term for the concept going to see with your own eyes: go and see the customer actually use the product, don’t just listen to what they say - Quality Conversation with Gary Convis - management improvement articles
I have mentioned Reddit (an online community that is highly skewed toward software engineers who are a bit irreverent) before: Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus. The site highlights stories voted up by the community and so the makeup of the community has a huge impact on what is highlighted. The users are very willing to challenge authority (and in fact anxious to do so I think). So some topics are common: criticizing DRM, science, criticizing the United States’ role in the war in Iraq, programming, iconoclasts, xkcd, criticiszing stupid corporate behavior, Paul Graham, criticizing Fox.
Lately there have been a large number of stories on people being killed in raids by police on the wrong house: police in full swat gear storming the wrong house by accident and then killing occupants. The media in general sees these as “special causes” - isolated incidents. So while tragic the strategy is then to examine what mistake in this unique situation lead to tragedy. I believe that the readers of Reddit sense this is a systemic problem and therefore see the proper examination to undertake is to look at the whole system. That is, to use the common cause improvement strategy - when the tragedy is seen not as an isolated incident but the result of a system.
It seems to me the Reddit readers are right - I think the users natural tendencies (a willingness to question authority and a trained sense of what is a special cause and what is a common cause, even if they don’t use those terms) result in the stories gaining traction within Reddit. To limit future tragedy the system as a whole needs to be examined. Do not seek to find the special cause that led to the problem in one instance. Look to the system and see why this trend has increased. I don’t actually have good data - I am making a guess that this trend has increased in the last 20 years (getting some decent data on what is really going on is obviously one of the first things to do in looking at this issue).
(more…)
The ‘Toyota Way’ Is Translated for a New Generation of Foreign Managers
Related: People: Team Members or Costs - What makes Toyota tick? - Trust: Respect for People - Toyota Land - Origins of the Toyota Production System
Kaizen, That Continuous Improvement Strategy, Finds Its Ideal Environment by Hal R. Varian
Old media just do not understand online kaizen. Their perceptions are tied to the print world, where design changes are costly. The Wall Street Journal spent years planning its recent redesign of the print edition and millions of dollars rolling it out. Yet it will be months before it becomes clear how successful these changes were.
The advantages to experimentation on web applications are huge. I am also reminded of my paper from 1999: Using Quality to Develop an Internet Resource.
Via: Kaizen for Web Pages
Related: Be Thankful for Lean Thinking - Management Consulting web sites (like the old media he mentions) - Our Policy is to Stick Our Heads in the Sand - Patent Review Innovation - Planet Kaizen - kaizen definition
“Scientific thinking” the modern way by Bill Harris:
I thank Deb Schenk, then (and perhaps now) statistician at Hewlett-Packard Company, for teaching me and others about the design of experiments using Statistics for Experimenters: An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building back in 1981-82.
I admit to a bit of bias, in seeing my father’s book (Statistics for Experimenters 2nd edition was published last year by the way), referenced but Bill Harris is exactly right in the power of design of experiments. The most recent post discusses Ackoff’s excellent f-Laws and a previous post discusses Deming (titled, It’s the process) so I couldn’t resist adding a post myself.
Related: design of experiments posts - Ackoff’s New Book: Management f-Laws
Short term lean thinking payoffs are nice, but the long term benefits are much more powerful.
Related: Danaher’s Low Profile Lean Excellence - Lean Blog - lean manufacturing articles - 10 Stocks for 10 years update (Danaher was in serious consideration)
Smith added, “Sustaining lean is very difficult. And, let’s clarify what sustaining means – it is NOT maintaining what you have, but sustaining continuous change. People need to understand that lean is a way of thinking, it’s a life changing event. It’s not the tools, the rules or the principles. It’s all of that added together.”
Related: Long Term Lean Payoffs - Holding Improvement Gains - Lexus: Long Term Thinking - How to Improve - management improvement articles
Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2008 powered by WordPress
