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.
• The hidden dangers of working in IT by Jai – To manage stress “Be really clear on what you can do and how long you think it will take. Raise any issues as soon as you are aware of them.”
• Best Kanban Signal of All by Mike Wroblewski – “if our leadtime extends beyond our customers delivery expectation, we certainly have a need to set up a production system to satisfy our customer with the least amount of inventory.”
• Advice For First Time A3 Authors by Brian Buck – “Do not write your A3 alone – You will be the only author that puts pencil to the 11×17 paper but ensure you incorporate the feedback you get from the stakeholders you talk to.”
• Run is to Milk as Spider is to… by Jon Miller – “The water spider is a quirky piece of terminology that refers to a person who helps keeps materials and processes flowing within a lean operating system by following standardized work which involves material replenishment and other potential interruptions to the line.”
• Testing the Wisdom of Crowds on the Madness of NCAA Basketball by Lucas Mast – “Predictalot is what is called a combinatorial prediction market… We hope that with your participation it will prove a great test to the limits of what the wisdom of crowds can produce. We’d also like to pave the way for the serious use of combinatorial prediction market technology in a host of other arenas down the road.”
• Teaching by Asking Why by Kevin Meyer – “I don’t want to deal with students trying to get a good grade. I want to deal with students who can fearlessly engage, debate, discuss, teach, and learn with one another. “
• Bill George on Leadership by John Hunter – “an organization exists to provide value to customers not to maximize shareholder value.”