Management Improvement Carnival #38

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

  • Value in Value Stream Mapping by Mike Wroblewski – “value stream maps helped us all agree on our current state and what our future state vision looks like. With this shared vision, our team began to move forward as a team.”
  • AgileVersusLean by Martin Fowler – “So as you can see, lean and agile are deeply intertwined in the software world. You can’t really talk about them being alternatives, if you are doing agile you are doing lean and vice-versa”
  • Measuring customer satisfaction by Shaun Sayers – “Indirect measures are tricky, because indirect measures are derived from analysing customer behaviour and then making an interpretation about what that behaviour means”
  • Anchoring a Problem Solving Culture by Mark Rosenthal – “When a problem occurs, the first response is to detect it, then to fix (or contain) it. That is jidoka. But at some point, someone has to investigate why it happened, get to the root cause, and establish a robust countermeasure.”
  • Surgical Checklists in the News! by Mark Graban – “For all of the medical and clinical brilliance in our hospitals, they often have a great deal of opportunity for operational improvements.”
  • Six Sigma: Some problems by John Dowd – “Finally the calculation of six-sigma itself is accomplished by dividing a denominator based on a subjective assumption (The number of opportunities over which a defect can occur) into a measure of the number of defects where defects have been so ill-defined as to produce no meaningful measurement”
  • Genjitsu: The Only Reality by Jon Miller – “lean management gently boots these successful professionals back to the gemba to find the only reality.”
  • Technology Doesn’t Solve Everything by Frank Roche – “Technology, while nice, is no substitute for walking up and talking to employees.”
  • Kansei engineering by Chris Angus – “Developing new products and services is by nature a risky business; Kansei Engineering is a rigorous scientific approach to designing-in emotional appeal that can reduce this risk”
  • Essential systems thinking for managers by Bill Harris – “if we create our own problems, then we have some control over fixing those problems. That’s a lesson worth remembering.”
  • Toyota Puts People First by Kevin Meyer – “Most companies would send the employees home or even worse, lay them off. Toyota recognizes that people are hired for their brains, not just their hands.”
  • 5 Steps to Tiger by Ron Pereira – “I believe solutions to most problems are waiting for us to find them. We just have to keep looking.”
  • Using a Virtual Andon Board in the Back Office by Ralph Bernstein – “application of lean principles to the process of closing a company’s books for a given time period (i.e., a year, a quarter). She described what was, in effect, a virtual andon board.”
  • Zipcar Innovation by John Hunter – “The whole process is a significant change from the previous rental model (gas, parking and insurance included). Zipcar makes deals with local governments to secure zipcar parking near public transportation.”
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