- Agile Lessons from a Management Guru by Ahmed Yousuf – “Agile methodologies have a fundamentally different approach to quality – an approach that is inherent in this teaching from Deming. Quality cannot be achieved by testers inspecting work done by developers. Quality can only be achieved if developers, business analysts, architects and testers – all take measures to ensure that it is part of every task they perform.”
- How Resource Constraints Can Set You Free by Matthew E. May – “He envisioned a self-contained, self-sustaining water system complete with a high-capacity water tank and four large spaces for billboard advertising and public service messages. The ad revenue pays for maintenance. Children playing powers it.” (Appropriate technology is something I have always been very interested in, as a child I traveling around with my father (engineer, statistician, professor and management consultant) as he worked on such practical projects. See my Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog posts on appropriate technology, including both examples in the post – John Hunter).
- ScrumButs Are the Best Part of Scrum by Jurgen Appelo – “Scrum teams are self-organizing complex systems… then you must accept that optimal behavior of a team cannot be predicted. It is impossible to design the process up-front. It must emerge, just like the design of the solution.”
- Whirlpool Evansville Dies the Unnecessary but Expected Death By Kevin Meyer – “Rest in peace Whirlpool of Evansville. With a management team focused on the cost of hands instead of the value of brains we’ll probably be saying the same for Whirlpool as a whole in a few years.”
- Applying the Decoupling Principle to Scrum by Damon Poole – “In Scrum, there are many activities which are often tightly coupled to the iteration cadence: iteration planning, having a shippable increment of work, the size of the largest story, iteration reviews, retrospectives, and releases.”
- The Lean Manager – Medication Errors – “The first step then to reduce medication errors and other adverse events is to have a clear list of the most frequent patient acts and to start reviewing the confirmation part of the process.”
- The Best Leadership Is Good Management by John Hunter – “I have never been comfortable with the attempts to separate leadership from managing. Normally the tone is that leadership is what matters and managing is just then carrying out what leaders have determined and allowed.”
Related: Curious Cat Economics and Investing Carnival – Management Improvement Carnival #43
