Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.
- The Skipper & First Mate: A Pattern for Continual Progress by Jamie Dinkelacker – “An organization can only depend on individuals in critical chain processes when individuals are fungible — one can quickly take over for another with no interruption of the work flow. Moreover, it implies that there’s a pool of available developers, ready to step in, who themselves aren’t engaged in other priority activities. Software isn’t like that.”
- The evils of mass production by Kathleen Fasanella – “Really, I’d love to get feedback on what you think defines subassemblies and where you think batching is unavoidable. I don’t mean unavoidable in your particular situation, I mean over-all, assuming you had every resource at your disposal.”
- 10 Benefits of One Piece Flow by Ron Pereira – “we are better able to respond to last minutes changes from the customer. And everyone knows, no matter what industry you work in, customers love to change their mind.”
- Ask Why? – but How? by Mark Rosenthal – “Observe and gather information. Formulate possible hypotheses. For each reasonable possibility, determine what information would confirm or refute it… Observe, gather information, experiment. Get answers to those questions.”
- Improving Healthcare Delivery by Studying Toyota by Jon Miller – “As part of this they have taken hundreds of physicians and hospital administrators to Japan to learn kaizen on the shop floor. Their approach was radical surgery in the minds of some, but it has absolutely turned VMMC around in terms of profitability and speed of positive change.”
- If you can’t distort the data, just don’t look at it – “Just yesterday I ran into a baffling extension of distorting the data: if you have data which tells a bad story about your own organization, hide it!…I’m still seething that someone would turn a blind eye to a productivity problem for fear of how it might reflect on them.”
- The Quandary of Sales Incentives by Kevin Meyer – “So am I favorable toward commission-based sales? No, not yet. Sales is still part of the team like everyone else, and should be rewarded when their team and the company do well. But the last several years has given me new and different perspectives on sales.”
- Zeroing-In on a Workflow Issue by Ian Furst – “The take home message is that it is not enough to know the average wait time; you have to know the amount of variation in the wait time as well.”
- Check and Adjust System by Lee Fried – “Now that we are moving into the execution phase of our cycle it is critical that we begin the process of putting in place a linked checking process based on PDCA that needs to link all levels of the organization.”
- How a Non-Lean Culture Can Harm Patients by Mark Graban – “Tracing this back to Deming, employees are supposed to be able to have pride in their work. Not letting them speak up, knowing something bad might happen destroys that. It’s also not very customer/patient focused”
- How to apply standard work to meetings by Dan Markovitz – “The company also tracks performance on a variety of metrics after meetings. Are people getting the answers they need? Are problems resolved? Is there a higher or lower level of production problems following the meeting?”
- Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses by John Hunter – “Does it surprise you to learn traders would cover up losses to protect bonuses? It shouldn’t, it happens over and over. Would it surprise you that almost any bonus (or quota) scheme increases the odds that the data will be doctored to meet the goals? It shouldn’t.”
