Posted on July 30, 2008  Comments (0)

See more photos from my visit to Parfrey’s Glen Natural Area in Wisconsin, about an hour outside of Madison. It really was amazingly beautiful – the pictures do not do it justice. The Parfrey’s Glen trail is under a mile but well worth visiting. If you want to hike more try the Ice Age National Scenic Trail or nearby Devil’s Lake State Park. The top photo is of me (John Hunter) at nearby Durwood’s Glen. The yellow flower is from Parfrey’s Glen.

Related: Coopers Rock State Forest, West Virginia – Metropolitan Museum of Art – South Carolina travel photos – The Importance of Management Improvement – Hoh Rain Forest and Ruby Beach – North Cascades National Park

Posted on July 29, 2008  Comments (0)

An Essential Primer on Full and Fractional Factorial Test Design

I am a fan of design of experiments as long time readers know (see posts on design of experiments).

Some good resources for more on the topics discussed above: What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs? by George Box – Statistics for Experimenters – Design of Experiments in Advertising.

Related: Google Website Optimizer – factorial experiment articles – Using Design of Experiments – Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments

Posted on July 28, 2008  Comments (2)

In Keeping Good Employees I talked about asking some simple questions. The biggest mistake I see managers make is to fail to deliver on what they say in such meetings.

There is the saying “It is better to be thought a fool than speak, and prove it.” Well it is better to be thought a pointy haired boss than to ask for feedback, then ignore it, and prove you are a PHB. This behavior is extremely common with a survey of employee satisfaction but can extend to any failure of management follow through. If you are not going to act on what good employees tell you – don’t ask.

If some of what they mention is something you disagree with, then explain that to them. Even bad decision making that is explained is better than no explanation and no action. If you end up explaining why no action can be taken on any suggestion then employees should rightfully (most likely) find you lacking. One aspect of the explanation is to educate them for future suggestions – there may well be factors they don’t think about that you must. But, even in such a case the best practice is normally to adjust the idea a bit to make it workable.

Related: Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone – Bring Me Problems and Solutions if You Have Them – Standardized Work Instructions – How to Improve – Write it Down – What Could be Improved?

Posted on July 26, 2008  Comments (0)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service providing web hosting. The cloud computing solution has been used by many organizations successfully. However the solution has experienced some problems including failing for much of the day on July 20th.

Amazon S3 Availability Event

The failure was significant but in my view the advantages of Amazon S3 are still very significant. A huge advantage is how quickly you can scale if needed be. If your application is not hosted on Amazon S3 and it grows enormously you have to physically deal with buying servers, installing them, installing software… All this takes time. On Amazon S3 when you need the bandwidth you can get it, when you don’t need it you don’t have it sitting around unused. In that way it is very lean, it seems to me.

And while server infrastructure failures are bad, for most organizations the option is not Amazon S3 or some solution that is 100% reliable. Currently it is difficult to keep IT infrastructures online and operating and coping with shifting demand… For many situations Amazon S3 seems to be a great resource. They need to keep improving; and they seem to be doing so. Being open and honest about the challenges is a good sign. And improving the system, not blaming a person is another good sign.

Related: Bezos on the Internet Boom – Amazon’s Amazing Achievement – Bezos on Lean Thinking – CERN Pressure Test Failure – 12 Stocks for 10 Years Update (June 2008), Amazon is up 116% in the portfolio since 2005, just behind Google and ahead of Petro China

Posted on July 24, 2008  Comments (3)

Understanding Why Good Workers Quit

Good advice. I like direct, simple, questions. What can we do to keep you? What do you enjoy about your job? What do you dislike? What can I do to increase your joy in work? What one thing would you most like to see changed? What do you want to see continue? Would you like help in some aspect of your career development? What can I do better? Am I providing too much oversight, not enough?

Give honest straight forward answers to questions. If someone wants to move ahead and needs to work harder to advance their career tell them that. If they need to be more cooperative, develop certain skills… tell them. The idea is not just to make the person happy in that meeting. If they need to work on certain things to get where they want then help them do that. Give your best advice and say what they can do to improve.

Related: People are Our Most Important Asset – What 1 Thing Can We Improve? – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? – Silicon Valley Style Hiring – How to Improve – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology – The Joy of Work

Posted on July 23, 2008  Comments (1)

HP shatters excessive packaging world record

It is hard to imagine what management system creates such solutions. But it is not hard to image Dilbert’s pointy haired boss fitting right in there.

Related: Is Poor Service the Industry Standard (HP)? – Muda/waste – Customers Get Dissed and Tell – Companies in Need of Customer Focus

Posted on July 22, 2008  Comments (1)

Paul Graham has some excellent ideas. I have written about some of them previously: Innovation Strategy, What Business Can Learn from Open Source and Google and Paul Graham’s Latest Essay. Y Combinator, which he founded, provides seed funding. Here are some ideas they would like to fund:

Related: Our Policy is to Stick Our Heads in the Sand – Find Joy and Success in Business – Innovative Thinking from Clayton Christensen

Posted on July 21, 2008  Comments (0)

Pay for performance is a bad investment by Pete Waters

As Deming said (page 102 of Out of the Crisis): “The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.” Understanding enough about managing organizations to know why it doesn’t work is not easy – which I think is a big reason why people go for the nice sounding, but flawed idea, I think. Read our posts on performance appraisals and the works we reference to learn.

Posted on July 19, 2008  Comments (0)

Manufacturing has new look in R.I.

Yet another illustration of what I have been saying for years. USA manufacturing continues to grow and USA manufacturing jobs continue to shrink (as do worldwide manufacturing jobs). And as I have been saying for years, China manufacturing output continues to grow very quickly and China manufacturing jobs continue to shrink (China lost 7 times as many manufacturing jobs as the USA from 1995-2002).

Related: Manufacturing and the Economy (2005 post) – Creating Jobs – Top 10 Manufacturing Countries 2006 – America’s Manufacturing Future – Wisconsin Manufacturing – Manufacturing Employee Shortage in Utah

Posted on July 17, 2008  Comments (0)

Amazing Stat: California Uses More Gas than China:

Interesting data. The Curious Cat Economics Blog recently posted on the top oil consuming countries.

Related: Car Powered Using Compressed Air – Failure to Increase Gas Tax – Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog – Energy posts

Posted on July 15, 2008  Comments (0)

• “Certifications” – Buying Credibility? by Mark Rosenthal – “if you are looking for your own professional development, and look at a program for what it is: An academic education, and possibly an opportunity to establish professional network, then go for it. Just don’t go in believing that ‘being certified’ means a whole lot else.”
• Toyota Invests In Workers Instead of Laying Them Off by Mark Graban – “You can treat people as expendable costs or an asset to train and invest in. Even as Toyota’s truck sales have plummeted, are they resorting to layoffs? Nope!!”
• Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position by John Dowd – “I can still clearly hear his words, “There is no substitute for knowledge.” The knowledge is there in the pages of his book. It needs only to be extracted and acted on.”
• Deer Poka Yokes by Mike Gardner – “if the deer would just follow the operation standard and flow with the traffic instead of attempting to flow at right angles to it, all of this could be avoided”
• Too Bad, So Sad by Kevin Meyer – “Like most companies that try to implement lean, it appears that the second pillar, respect for people, was forgotten. Therefore most of the potential benefit was lost.”
• Projects vs. Process Improvement – “By taking a project as opposed to process improvement approach it is very hard to make performance visible and understand the effect improvement interventions are having or will have.”
• We Do Not Make What We Do Not Sell by Jon Miller – “Production control is a comprehensive activity of planning, organizing production and related activities including purchasing, managing inventory and production cost controls”
• Age and the Entrepreneur by Paul Kedrosky – “People founding tech companies over the last ten years had an average and median age of 39-years, nowhere near the age that makes for good stories about dorm room entrepreneurs”
• Queue Management by Mark – “the measurement of ‘on time’ is ‘pull away from the gate’ not “leave the ground” so in order to get an ‘on time’ departure, they will load the plane as scheduled, then go sit on the tarmac rather than delaying the passenger load. A great example of ‘management by measurement’ not getting exactly the intended results.”
• Free Download – Chapter 1 of “Lean Hospitals” by Mark Graban
• Better Meetings by John Hunter – Document decisions on a flip chart that everyone can see in the meeting and then email everyone the decisions.

Posted on July 14, 2008  Comments (0)

An outcome measure is used to measure the success of a system. For example, the outcome measure could be the percentage of people who do not get polio (the result). An output measure, for example, would be the number of people vaccinated with the polio vaccine (the output). Often we measure inputs (amount of money spent) or outputs (number of people vaccinated). They are usually easy to measure but obviously less valuable proxies for what the objective of the system (reducing the incidence of polio).

You should have all these types of measures but outcome measures are most likely to be missing so special care should be taken to make sure you are using them. It is important to define good outcome measures to use in determining the success of systems, and in determining the whether improvement projects actually result in improved outcomes.

In-process measures can be valuable in providing actionable information sooner than the outcome measure would allow action. In the polio example, an in process measure example could be % of vaccination by the time a babies is 18 months old. And looking across a country say it might well make sense to stratify the data to see if certain areas were doing poorly on this measure. If so that might be where to focus improvement. You don’t need to wait until people not vaccinated start contracting polio (which will likely be delayed for years after the system starts to have processes fail, in this example) to then notice the problem and then react.

Waiting for the outcome measure to point to a problem in this case (and in many cases) is far too late for process improvement. So process measures are needed to aid in managing the system and reacting to process results, before those processes create poor results (and can be seen as poor outcome measures). More on outcome measures.

Related: Operational Definition – tampering – management improvement web search – Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations – Data is a Proxy – posts on managing using data

Posted on July 10, 2008  Comments (0)

• Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt – “I don’t see any reason why managers in the past shouldn’t have had the qualities he seems to be saying are needed now. And I don’t see any reason why the qualities needed now were not needed in the past.”
• Curious Cat Travels: Olympic National Park and Mt. St. Helens – the photo above is me in Olympic National Park.
• Management is Prediction – “I believe Deming’s thoughts about prediction are most effectively put into action using the PDSA cycle. Specifically, you must predict what the results in the planning phase (prior to piloting improvements). I find that this is rarely done.”
• New Toyota CEO’s Views – quote of CEO, Katsuaki Watanabe “Management has to visit the shop floor and gain first-hand experience of what’s taking place. We need to look at the manufacturing processes, listen to voices, and clearly recognize problems.”

A couple more: Managing Fear – Bezos on Lean Thinking – Could Toyota Fix GM – Saving Lives: US Health Care Improvement

Posted on July 8, 2008  Comments (0)

The Drucker difference and Toyota’s success by Ira A. Jackson, dean of the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, the business school of the Claremont Colleges.

Related: Drucker Opinion Essays from the WSJ – Deming and Toyota – Management Pioneer Peter Drucker – The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success – Extreme Toyota: Radical Contradictions That Drive Success at the World’s Best Manufacturer

Posted on July 7, 2008  Comments (2)

Meetings are perennial problems. People sit through meetings and then complain about how big a waste of time it was. Here are a couple very simple tips to try and actually improve (instead of just agreeing that meetings are wasteful, but doing nothing to improve).

• Have an agenda (with desired outcomes – decision on x, or whatever) and stick to it (I think you can successfully adapt as the meeting goes on, but be truthful, can you do so successfully – if so fine, if not stick to the agenda). If there are no desired outcomes, why are you meeting?
• Most of the time you can improve just by having fewer meetings. So when you find there is no actually benefit to a meeting be happy – that is one more meeting that can be eliminated.
• Document decisions on a flip chart that everyone can see in the meeting and then email everyone the decisions. This is a huge help in my experience. People often just want to get the meeting over with, so everyone just ignores that no decision has actually been made and just hopes the meeting ends. For those things you have decided it is worth meeting on, it is worth making sure everyone understands the decision the same way (how often do you waste time in between meetings and in future meetings as people present alternative versions of what was actually decided.
• Talk to those involved in regular meetings and ask what can be improved. Improve your meeting process over time. If you don’t have an improvement process in place for meetings that is a bad sign.

I would strongly suggest if someone thinks they need to answer emails… instead of pay attention to the meeting they should not be in the meeting. Some people love to multi-task and act like they are too important to focus on something. I don’t find that true, instead they are just people that like to seem busy but not actually accomplish tasks. If your staff are doing this stop them. If you are subjected to working with such people, try to exclude them from the meeting and deal with people that actually care to focus and get things done.

Critical people on the other hand I find valuable (while others don’t want to deal with them). Encourage people to be open if meetings are not an effective use of their time. Talk to them about how to improve the meeting process. I take as true the idea that meetings are a problem and so those willing to state this and help make them better should be valued.

The Team Handbook also has good information on running effective meetings.

Related: Most Meetings are Muda – Programmers see meetings as wastes of time – Arbitrary Rules Don’t Work – Be Careful What You Measure

Posted on July 3, 2008  Comments (0)

It is obvious a few companies don’t have any ability to, provide even just reasonably bad service (for them the goal of decent service is so far away as to not be reasonable). How often do Verizon (based on their lousy track record I won’t get FIOS), Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, United… get blasted for horrible custom service? So often it is not news. Still, the stories of their failures are written about over and over as they make so many people so mad some can’t help posting yet another story about the failures to value customers. Seth Godin is one recent example – Learning from frustration:

Related: Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – More Bad Customer Service Examples – Customer Hostility from Discover Card – Is Bad Service the Industry Standard? – Ritz Carlton and Home Depot – Better and Different

Posted on July 1, 2008  Comments (0)

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• Value in Value Stream Mapping by Mike Wroblewski – “value stream maps helped us all agree on our current state and what our future state vision looks like. With this shared vision, our team began to move forward as a team.”
• AgileVersusLean by Martin Fowler – “So as you can see, lean and agile are deeply intertwined in the software world. You can’t really talk about them being alternatives, if you are doing agile you are doing lean and vice-versa”
• Measuring customer satisfaction by Shaun Sayers – “Indirect measures are tricky, because indirect measures are derived from analysing customer behaviour and then making an interpretation about what that behaviour means”
• Anchoring a Problem Solving Culture by Mark Rosenthal – “When a problem occurs, the first response is to detect it, then to fix (or contain) it. That is jidoka. But at some point, someone has to investigate why it happened, get to the root cause, and establish a robust countermeasure.”
• Surgical Checklists in the News! by Mark Graban – “For all of the medical and clinical brilliance in our hospitals, they often have a great deal of opportunity for operational improvements.”
• Six Sigma: Some problems by John Dowd – “Finally the calculation of six-sigma itself is accomplished by dividing a denominator based on a subjective assumption (The number of opportunities over which a defect can occur) into a measure of the number of defects where defects have been so ill-defined as to produce no meaningful measurement”
• Genjitsu: The Only Reality by Jon Miller – “lean management gently boots these successful professionals back to the gemba to find the only reality.”

Read more