Posted on January 29, 2009  Comments (1)

The newspaper industry is facing challenging times. One success story is the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas. I first heard about their efforts years ago:

Watchful Eyes on Kansas Media Innovations, NPR, 2005

The Newspaper of the Future, by Timothy O’Brien, New York Times

The company has continued on an path of customer focus and innovation. There work shows what can be done by understanding what need you fulfill for customers.

They understand what they offer customers (and it isn’t just paper). They understand the technology related to their business (not the technology of their past methods of working but the technology possibilities related to serving their customers). They understand the realities of the marketplace. And they have divined a strategy based on this knowledge (they have innovated). And finally, the Lawrence Journal-World has maintained a constancy of purpose.

Related: Zipcar Innovation – Innovation Strategy – Information Technology and Business Process Support Read more

Posted on January 28, 2009  Comments (1)

Jeff Bezos and Root Cause Analysis by Pete Abilla

Using quality tools really works. Lots of people don’t use them. Improving is often not any more difficult than just applying tools that have been used for decades. Improving does not require rocket science. Just do the simple things and you are well on your way to great success. Of the 10 stocks in my original 10 stocks for 10 years post Amazon is one of 4 that are up.

Related: Bezos on Lean Thinking – Amazon Innovation – Bezos Webcast on the Internet Boom – Improvement Tools and Improving Management – Root Cause Analysis – European Blackout is Not “Human Error”

Posted on January 26, 2009  Comments (0)

This is a good example of a sensible corporate blog post, Online Data Backup. Their blog is fairly staid and impersonal (which is not normal for blogs) but as corporations take up blogging many such blogs are coming into being. blogs began as very personal communication vehicles, but that trait is not required (though completely impersonal blogs do not really seem like blogs at all). The balance between boring, pushy marketing and providing useful information while mentioning your services is a bit tricky and something different people have varying tolerances for.

I think this post is successful at walking the balance between marketing and saying something worth reading. I would imagine others would find it too marketing focused. I think one focus a corporate blog needs to take is the purpose of the blog is to provide users useful and interesting information. Within that context highlighting offerings from the company is fine, but if providing value to the blog readers is not seen as the primary focus the blog is not going to be effective.

Also be sure those writing for, and making decisions about, the blog understand the technology and accepted practices of the blogging world. Coming off as some stilted, out-of-touch, outdated organization is probably not going to help the organization. One simple example is many blogs don’t even link out to studies etc. that they reference. This is a very lame practice (one the Lenovo site seems to employ). Such practices are common among those that don’t understand the internet (which is not a group you want to be in if you are publishing a blog). Also, as a reader, be very wary of statistics without context (such as those quoted above without providing links to the full reports).

Also, the blog post makes provides a good reminder, backup is important. This is valuable reminder, because it is an important thing to do, and because it is fairly commonly a weakness. Breathing is important too, but we don’t really need to remind people, they breath without reminders.

Some good corporate blog examples: Dell Innovation – Amazon S3 Failure Analysis – Management Training Program – Toyota’s Commitment – Blogging is Good for You – Visual Instructions Example (Seagate backup drive)

Posted on January 25, 2009  Comments (0)

In 2007, I kept failing to plan for a vacation, finally I just booked some tickets to Utah without much of a plan. And still had done little to plan as I departed. So I bought some travel books and started on the trip while I was figuring out where I should go. I did know Utah offers amazing hiking options and I found many great hikes that made for a great trip.

The first day of the trip began in Salt Lake City and then a visit to Antelope Island State Park in the Great Salt Lake. The next day I hiked the Mount Timpanogos Trail (where the photos on this page are from). The following morning I enjoyed the Timpanogos Cave National Monument. The Mount Timpanogos area is about an hour from Salt Lake City. My trip continued to the Dinosaur National Monument. Once I add more of the photos to my travel site, I will add a new post here.

Related: Curious Cat photos while hiking through National Parks – Wind Cave and Jewel Cave – Grand Teton National Park Read more

Posted on January 23, 2009  Comments (0)

I am a big believer in marketing by providing some content for free. It is a great idea for consultants. It is also a great idea for those looking to sell books and audio-visual content.
Can Free Content Boost Your Sales? Yes, It Can

If you are looking to create some business in the rough economy, try thinking creatively and expand your ideas of what is a good strategy for gaining customers. Providing sensible online resources is a far better strategy than hiring a bunch of lawyers to sue college students. I posted a link to Monty Pythons great explanation of what they were doing on one of my other blogs last November. Enjoy.

Related: Giving Away Your Service for Free on Weekends – Innovative Marketing Podcast – Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet – Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments

Posted on January 22, 2009  Comments (4)

Don’t be negative. Most people agree with that statement. We see being negative as bad. If you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything. Well, I don’t agree. While presenting your ideas in a constructive way is helpful, I don’t agree with those that try to discourage negative comments.

I understand that the psychology of many people has lead them to want confirmation and to dislike criticism of ideas they propose. And I understand our society has re-enforced the desire to see criticism as bad. Using better words and phrasing your comments more effectively to make your points and avoiding being seen as negative is good). But I wish more people objected to bad ideas instead of just letting them go because they were afraid of being seen as negative.

Yes it would be nice if they objected in some wonderfully polished way. It would however also be nice if people were not so insecure that criticizing an idea required being very careful not to be seen as negative. And if I have to focus on improving one thing (in an organization) it would be how poorly people react to a negative comment rather than trying to avoid negative comments. Now, in reality we don’t have to chose one, we can do both, but the choice I would make shows where I see the larger problem today.

People should try to be constructive with criticism. I don’t think there are many people that disagree with that. However, I think people need to learn how to encourage people to criticize their ideas. We want more people providing their thoughts, not less. And what I see most often from people objecting to “negative” comments is an attempt to discourage raising legitimate issues, using the claim of “negativity.” Obviously this is not always the case. But that is the problem I see far more often than the problem of someone that is just negative.

I want people to be open to new ideas. I want them to explore new opportunities. But I don’t care if they voice negative thoughts about why this won’t work here. Or saying that we tried that before and it didn’t work. Great, lets talk about why it didn’t work. Lets try to do something different this time. I don’t want people to ignore the negative feelings they have. Express them and lets deal with them.

Now there are some people that won’t stop just expressing negative opinions without exploring what that means about how we can cope with potential dangers and find more effective solutions. That is not very helpful. But overall give me more people that are seen as negative. We need more raising of problems. We need more people unsatisfied with the status quo.

Thoughts on, Two Sentences That Don’t Help: “That won’t work.” or “I don’t like that.” I think they do work. They are not perfect, if would be better to be constructive. But I would much rather here that when it is what is felt than someone thinking it won’t work and being quiet because they don’t want to be seen as negative.

Related: Bring Me Solutions or Problems – The difference between respect and disrespect is not avoiding avoiding criticism – The Lazy Unreasonable Man – Financial Market Meltdown – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology

Posted on January 20, 2009  Comments (0)

The 2008 Annual Management Improvement Carnival Review (published on a number of site) I am counting as #51, making this #52. That annual review turned out to be a very interesting collection, if you have not read all of them yet, take some time to do so. I linked to the first set of posts previously and here are the remaining posts

• Lean Six Sigma Academy:   Lean Blog, Gemba Panta Rei, Evolving Excellence, Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
• Evolving Excellence:   LSS Academy, Got Boondoggle, Work Matters and Edge Perspectives
• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog:   Lean Software Engineering, Timeback Management, Know HR and Quality and Innovation

And then some management posts from the last few weeks:

• What’s happened to great customer service? by Shaun Sayers – What’s happened to American customer service? … There was a worldwide consensus that the US had cracked this customer service mallarky, so the rest of the world paid a visit and learned a lot. But I’ll tell you something, those days are gone.
• Passion: An Important Software Development Trait by Dustin Marx – “in talking with associates, friends, and family members in various careers, it seems to me that engineers in general and software engineers/programmers/developers specifically tend to be more passionate about what they do than many folks in other industries.”
• Tips for Going to the Gemba by Lee Fried – “the transition to spending more time in the gemba is a difficult one for most leaders and is often short lived. They are not used to working directly with front line teams… After a couple of rounds the leader has had enough and the gemba visits no longer appear on their calendar.”
• The 37signals Effect by Louis Brandy – “When you take a single data point and you try to emulate certain practices to try to reproduce their success, you are entering very dangerous territory. In order to reproduce their successes, you need to understand the attributes that caused that success.” [benchmarking by copying is a failed strategy - John Hunter]

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Posted on January 17, 2009  Comments (3)

Checklists are a simple quality tool that have been used widely for decades. Pilots use them, without fail, to save lives. Some surgeons have been using them and the evidence is mounting that checklists can save many more lives if more in health care use them. Studies Show Surgeons Could Save Lives, $20B by Using Checklists

This is more great evidence of the value of applying simple management tools that are already well known. The idea that improvement takes brand new breakthrough ideas is just plain wrong.

Related: Using Books to Ignite Improvement – The Power of a Checklist – New, Different, Better – Management Improvement History and Health Care – Open Source Management Terms – Fast Company Interview with Jeff Immelt

Posted on January 15, 2009  Comments (0)

A Quality Manager for Obama

Previous administrations have had exactly the same thing (regardless what Time magazine says), so I don’t think we should get carried away. Eliminating wasteful government spending is a refrain from every new administration. She will be running the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and have this new title “Chief Performance Officer.” OMB has been the official waste watchdog, for at least decades. They are far from understanding muda. Time will tell if there is any change on that score going forward, I am skeptical.

Here is very typical OMB language from a 1995 memo by Alice M. Rivlin, Director of OMB:

I worked with improving management in the federal government at the Office of Personnel Management, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Quality Management Office and the White House Military Office. I was one of the founders of the ASQ Public Sector Network (now Government Division) and have managed the Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site since 1995. There have been plenty of great efforts to improve management in government that have made real progress. But there is much more that needs to be done.

There are complications in applying management improvement in government but they are fairly minor comparatively. In general, the difficulty is not the necessary adjustments for a different environment than the private sector, but similar challenges to improving private sector management.

In 1982, The Grace Commission provided a report to the Regan Administration. Radio Address to the Nation on the Management of the Federal Government by Ronald Reagan, October 29, 1988

The Clinton administration had the National Performance Review which was the closest thing to an attempt to move toward my concept of management improvement.

The current administration had their own President’s Management Agenda. Government Accountability: Efforts to Identify and Eliminate Waste and Mismanagement Hearing before the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, September 4, 2003.
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Posted on January 12, 2009  Comments (6)

Over the last couple of years the quality of management material available online has increased dramatically. And blogs have provided much of the best management material. The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival now provides highlights 3 times a month. Each carnival post highlights recent management related posts from several management blogs. And for the 2008 year in review 9 blogs have each taken a handful of management blogs and provided annual highlights.

In this post we will cover four blogs: Lean Software Engineering, Timeback Management, Know HR and Quality and Innovation. All I aim to do in the post is highlight a few excellent posts for the year. To capture the depth of these blogs add them to your RSS reader and read them throughout the year.

Lean Software Engineering by Corey Ladas (a management carnival host) and Bernie Thompson does an excellent job of discussion the application of lean manufacturing ideas in software development. Corey also published: Scrumban, Essays on
Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development this year. The blog is a must read for anyone working in software development applying lean thinking.

• Boehm’s Spiral Revisited by Bernie Thompson – “Twenty years ago this month, in response to the problems associated with waterfall-style approaches to software projects, Barry Boehm proposed his Spiral Model of Software Development. Which bore some resemblance to Deming’s “Plan, Do, Check, Act” cycle.“
• Queue utilization is a leading indicator by Corey Ladas – “there is a very pragmatic reason to adopt a Lean workflow strategy, regardless of what sort of product you are building: Lean scheduling provides crystal clear leading indicators of process health. I am speaking of kanban limits and andon lights.”
• Two axioms of lean software development by Corey Ladas – “Axiom 1: It is possible to divide the work into small value-adding increments that can be independently scheduled. Axiom 2: It is possible to develop any value-adding increment in a continuous flow from requirement to deployment. “
• Perpetual multivote for pull scheduling by Corey Ladas – “In our system, development capacity can free up at any time. When it does, the next candidate should have been previously selected so that the team can get right to work. That means we’ll have to make frequent updates to the selection process. If we’re going to do this frequently, it has to be inexpensive. Consensus building is expensive. My goal is to do this with no estimates and no meetings.”

The Timeback Management blog by Dan Markovitz focuses on applying lean principles to promote effective management. And as the name suggest he also posts on making effective user of your time.

• The Danger of Easy Access – “When we don’t value our limited time and attention sufficiently, we open the floodgates to infinite requests from coworkers — to our detriment… Get lean: in the tradition of Toyota’s andon, put up a sign at your cube or office that says when you’ll be available to talk.” [I must admit I have challenges with the common lean view of open offices, for the same reasons Dan mentions here. I prefer the model Joel Spolsky uses for software development staff, where collaboration is encouraged but developers have private offices. I am sure I benefit from a distraction free environment. There is debate in the lean blogosphere about the proper lean model though. My belief is that partially the answers lies in examining what is right for the specific office in question (though perhaps I am just clinging to an outdated idea). I find Instant Messaging (IM) useful (for encouraging collaboration and providing less distraction - including allowing people to work from home). This disruption from IM seems less obtrusive and you can set a status as Dan mentions to indicate how hesitant people should be before sending an IM. - John Hunter]

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Posted on January 9, 2009  Comments (0)

Clayton Christensen’s ideas on disruptive innovation are very powerful. I have written about Innovation Thinking with Clayton Christensen previously. Here is an example of such innovation. All you need is a broadband internet connection and you can Kiss your phone bill good-bye:

I ordered mine from Amazon for $203 and have been using it for a month, it has been great. Relatively easy to setup (they had a pretty good customer survey and I recommended they use colored cables – they color cables in the drawings in the users guide but give you 3 white cable to use – they are different types of cables so it isn’t tough to figure out but that would make it a bit easier).

I have been using Vonage for awhile and it is ok, but I don’t see any reason to pay each month when Ooma doesn’t charge a monthly fee (even on the lowest option on Vonage the bill is over $22/month). When I tried to cancel Vonage they refuse to allow it through the web site. Then forced me through voice mail maze only to then say we only answer the phone for you between 9-5 EST on workdays (that is about 75% of the time they are unavailable). I called back a week later, when I got a chance and they forced me through 10 minutes of wasted time but at lest I was able to get it canceled – once they refused to allow cancellation over the web site I was worried the customer disservice would be greater than it was.

Related: Six Keys to Building New Markets by Unleashing Disruptive Innovation – Save Money on Food – The Innovators Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor – Using Google to Eliminate IT Costs

Posted on January 7, 2009  Comments (1)

The first half of the 2008 annual management blog carnival posts are online now. The posts highlight some of the best posts on management blogs in the last year. Follow the links to read some of the excellent posts that have been highlighted on the following blogs:

• Making Sense With Facilitated Systems:   Tom Peters, MetaSD, John Schmidt, Paul Graham, FunnyBusiness, The Artful Manager and Amicus Agraria.
• Lean Blog:   The Lean Thinker, Elegant Solutions, John Shook’s Management and Daily Kaizen
• Got Boondoggle?:   Lean Printing, Learning About Lean, Improve with Me and Lean Insider
• Quality and Innovation:   Agile Management, Managing Software Development, Clarke Ching – More Chilli Please and iSixSigma blogs
• Elegant Solutions:   Shmula, Reforming Project Management, and Made to Stick (link broken so removed)

Related: Management Improvement Blog Carnival – Management Carnival posts – Curious Cat Management Improvement Search – The first Management Improvement Carnival

Posted on January 5, 2009  Comments (0)

Statistics for Experimenters, second edition, by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter and William G. Hunter (my father) is now available in Spanish.

Read a bit more can find a bit more on the Spanish edition, in Spanish. Estadística para Investigadores Diseño, innovación y descubrimiento Segunda edición.

Statistics for Experimenters – Second Edition:

Book available via Editorial Reverte

Related: Statistics for Experimenters Review – Correlation is Not Causation – Statistics for Experimenters Data – posts on design of experiments

Posted on January 3, 2009  Comments (6)

Response to What to Wear for an IT Job Interview?. Is this just a huge bit stereotypical?

I don’t see any harm in wearing a suit and tie or such business attire if you have no other information to go on for IT, or other employees. That advice to candidates is perfectly fine. Asking what is appropriate attire when the interview is set is also a good idea. In fact, that is all you need to take from this post as an interviewee, in my opinion.

Is there any value in you wearing a suit? If so, then not doing so might be a negative. The psychology of what makes people uncomfortable is tricky. And dress is one of those factors that may seem trivial but to differing extents most people base opinions partial on dress (even if they claim they don’t). Some organization with casual dress codes may also look at being too dressed up as a bad sign (out of touch…). Basically they are experiencing the same discomfort with your dress even though most likely they would profess to find those making judgments based on dress to be superficial. The Manager FAQ does a good job of looking at the thought process behind some managers thinking on the topic.

Even if there is no value to doing so there are many people who make judgments on silly factors like clothing.

Now for the most important point for manager’s, from this post, if you evaluate software developers on how they dress please quit and go work in some other line of work. You really don’t have what is needed to manage software developers or system administrators. If you are hiring someone to sit in meetings with MBAs and translate technology to them, then maybe being comfortable in a suit is a valued trait. But if you are hiring someone to create code 90+% of the time the suit is a completely silly measurement of value.

Related: Curious Cat Management Improvement Jobs – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? – Hiring the Right Workers – Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm
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