Management Improvement Carnival #135

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, systems thinking, customer focus, six sigma, leadership…).

• Go See, Ask Why, Show Respect by John Shook – “Go see, ask why, show respect is the way we turn the philosophy of scientific empiricism into actual behavior. We go observe what is really happening (at the gemba where the work takes place), while showing respect to the people involved”
• Don’t delegate unless by Wally Bock – “Can the team member do the work you want to delegate? If they can’t you need to give them the training or resources they need to do what you assign. If you’re not sure, you should delegate but monitor.
  Will the team member pitch in and do the work when you’re not checking?”
• The Seeds of Legendary by Mark Riffey – “To me, the folks that deliver legendary service offer consistency, little surprises, thoughtful, caring service. Not just nice, but more than you expect. Above and beyond. More than that, they set expectations by sharing with you that you’re about to experience the extraordinary – and then they deliver that and more. Talk isn’t enough. Delivery is critical.”
• My Week with Mr. Masaaki Imai by Ron Pereira – “The thing that I most taken aback by was how kind and humble Mr. Imai was (and is). Many of the so-called lean gurus of our time are not always the most humble and kind… in fact, some of them are flat out arrogant and hard to listen to.”
• What happens to user experience in a minimum viable product? – “I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I’m committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience. That way feature complexity — scope — is always the cost multiplier, not user experience.”
• When Good Data Go Bad – “In my mind, this is where traditional approaches to productivity go wrong. These approaches focus on improving the efficiency of producing these reports without considering whether or not they should be produced in the first place.”
• The Cost if Poor Quality Iceberg by Jon Miller – This is a great application of the lean principle of “making problems visible” to the important topic of the cost of poor quality.
• Avoiding Tragedy of the Commons for Software Development by John Hunter – “I think the “tragedy of the commons” analogy works. As long as the users don’t have pay for use (or decide to prioritize) the danger exists for the abuse.”