Management Improvement Carnival #91

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival provides links to recent articles to help managers improve the performance of their organization.

• A Mindless Worker is a Happy Worker “when people are given a chance to participate in creating something good, solving a problem, and play a role in adding value through the use of their mind, hands, and heart, good things happen.”
• Creating a Culture of Process Improvement by Rip Stauffer – “If you listen and act, you’ll soon find that you can’t keep up with the suggestions for improvement. That will be the beginning of changing the culture to one of improvement.”
• Creating Employee Engagement by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Organizations will often want people engaged and even teach them some skills to get them engaged, but fall short of creating a mechanism that actually enables this.”
• Why do we spend so much time putting out fires? by Dan Markovitz – “The process keeps everyone up to date on where things stand throughout the organization — no tedious, long-winded, meanderings in the 60 minute weekly (or god help you, 90 minute monthly) meeting.”
• 5 Reasons Why Agile Development Must Be Driven from the Top by Kelly Waters – “Another key concept of agile software development is co-location. Ideally the whole team will all be located in the same place – not just the same office but literally sitting side by side in the same room or space.”
• Counter Measures: Bringing balance to the process by JC Gatlin – “A Temporary Counter Measure is ‘immediate containment.’ This is an action or series of actions that the PDCA group will take to temporarily remedy the problem. This action may have no connection to the root causes.”
• Testing in the Data Center (Manufacturing No More) by James A. Whittaker – “This is the challenge of the new century of software. It’s not a process of get-it-as-reliable-as-possible-before-we-ship. It’s health care, cradle to grave health care … prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure.”
• The way to cut costs is to put care and insurance in the same bed by Clayton Christensen – “While hospitalization is a revenue opportunity to an independently managed hospital, in integrated systems hospitalization is seen as a failure. Integrated systems, including Kaiser Permanente in California, Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, the public systems in Finland and New Zealand, and the Veterans Administration in the U.S., can provide better care at 20% to 30% lower cost.”
• Top 14 Ways to Reduce Changeovers by Mike Wroblewski – “Use a Checklist. The easiest and simplest way not to forget any items needed for each changeover is to list everything on a checklist and use this list to verify things are not missing ahead of time.”
• Peter Drucker’s Impact on Lean Thinking by Jon Miller – “Drucker wrote about the need to empower workers and treat people as assets rather than just costs, originating the concept of human capital.”
• Mistake Proofing Software Development with Automated Tests by John Hunter – When a software developer changes the code, the automated unit and functional tests are all run and if there is an error noted by the automated testing the code is not deployed to the production environment.