Management Improvement Carnival #24

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

  • Is it Scrum or Lean? by Jeff Sutherland – “A thoughtful analysis of the relationship between complex adaptive systems and Lean will show that both Scrum and Lean are instantiations of complex adaptive systems theory.”
  • Deming’s Inconvenient Truth by Shaun Sayers – “Deming actually believed that a lot of important management information is not only unknown, but also unknowable.” (See Curious Cat on: “most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable”
  • Clothing manufacturer Fit Couture trip reports by Susanna Tisa – “To envision that these multiple SKU, complex products were being made on demand from website orders with a quick turnaround was mind-boggling.”
  • Five Questions to Ask When You Hear “We’re too busy for Lean” by Jon Miller – “If the manager is already in a constant fire-fighting mode, asking them to take on yet another project in the promise that it will make their life easier is like asking for spiritual enlightenment by reading a book.”
  • How Often Must the Same Mistake Be Repeated? by Mark Graban – “Wow, that is one hell of a systemic problem. It’s not as simple as one nurse being careless one time if the Quaid twins were overdosed TWICE and it happened with other patients.”
  • The Lean Approach to Email Management: It’s Not About Technology by Dan Markovitz – “To paraphrase Kevin Meyer, it doesn’t pay to worship the false god of the technological solution. Attack the problem at the root, rather than trying to apply some sort of electronic panacea to a fundamentally broken system. That’s lean thinking. And it works.”
  • The Question of “Spread” by Lee Fried – “All managers would follow the same improvement process, learn how to manage by data and facts, teach staff, follow a standard checking cadence, and focus on bringing processes under-control by implementing standard work within their centers.”
  • Systematic Problem Solving – “* They got everyone formal training on problem solving with heavy emphasis on true root cause. People were expected to follow the method.
    * A problem was not cleared from the board until a long term countermeasure had been implemented and verified as working.”
  • One Kaizen Goal + Safety by Mike Wroblewski – “A kaizen event should be focused on only one goal plus any safety improvements you can make to the process. Many times I have worked on kaizen events with multiple goals only to see the team lose focus”
  • Learning To See by Mike Gardner – “During a recent Value Stream Mapping workshop I emphasized the importance of seeing rather than just looking. This is especially true if we are familiar with the processes we are attempting to see.”
  • Toyota and the Power of People by Kevin Meyer – “If Toyota does what it has done best in the past, it will improve and maintain its lead in delivering customer value in terms of quality and innovation”
  • Arbitrary Rules Don’t Work by John Hunter – It is not ok to expect people to think the way you want them to. You have to understand how people will react and create solutions based on that.
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