Management Improvement Carnival #102

• 12 Things Good Bosses Believe by Robert I. Sutton – “My success – and that of my people – depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.” [I think this is so true. Ever manager should repeat this over and over every day until they give the boring details the attention it deserves over the flashy stuff – John].
• Should You Use a Business/IT Liaison Person? No! by Harwell Thrasher – “Prioritize your business needs so that IT can focus its limited resources on the most important things. Many liaison positions are really just ways of coping with a lack of business priorities”
• 5 Ways to Improve Your Teaching Skills by Ron Pereira – “If you don’t have a deep understanding of the content you’re about to present I suggest you take the time to gain a deep understanding of the material. In other words, you should have some real life, practical experiences to share with the students.”
• A breadth of fresh error by Mark Anderson – “it’s vital that experts convey the possible variability in their findings if we are to gain a true picture of what may, indeed, transpire.”
• Shorten and Reduce Variability in Lead Times using Kanban by Dennis Stevens – “Reducing variability in lead time will allow you to consistently know and commit when something can be delivered. Delivering consistently will help to increase the trust within the system.”
• Customer Service: Showing You Care by Wally Bock – “Your team’s job is to improve the service you deliver to your customers, inside and outside the organization. Make it a point to get out, to call customers, to ask questions and then listen.”
• Thoughts on two months of pairing by Sarah Mei – “I don’t take shortcuts. I write the tests first. I refactor code that needs it. I focus on doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, without being sloppy. I make sure I understand what I’m doing before I do it.”
• Of Team Size, Social Loafing and Lack of Direction by Mark Hamel – “Well executed kaizen is an opportunity for folks to improve the business. It’s also equally about improving the worker’s PDCA skill-sets and developing a lean culture. When teams are too large and they suffer the above described dynamics, we end up squandering these transformative opportunities.”
• New to agile? Learn how to fail well – “1) Fail Fast! 2) Learn from it. 3) Don’t do it the same way again.”
• Delegating with a Kanban – “Having it prominently posted ensures that the work doesn’t disappear into a computer file. And the red/green status bar enables someone to signal for help without having to schedule a formal meeting.”
• The Value of Rules by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “They provide guidance. They provide empowerment. They provide memory and learning.”
• Trust Your Staff to Make Decisions by John Hunter – When managers don’t trust that their systems hire and keep people that will make good decisions they sometimes chose not to give their staff any authority. That is a bad idea. The solution is to manage your systems so that you can trust people to make good decisions.

I took the photo of Red shouldered hawk, looking out the window from my home office.