The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site; you can subscribe via RSS for new article additions.
- Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed by John Hunter – “The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan.”
- Listen to Your Community, But Don’t Let Them Tell You What to Do by Jeff Atwood – “Community feedback is great, but it should never be used as a crutch, a substitute for thinking deeply about what you’re building and why. Always try to identify what the underlying needs are, and come up with a sensible roadmap.”
- You must balance the principle of ‘build to takt’ with the principle of ‘heijunka,’ and the principle of ‘respect for people.’ by Jeff Liker – “By keeping some planned inventory, and using it in the right way, you can achieve a more leveled schedule, heijunka, which in the early TPS models was the foundation of TPS. Building to takt, pull, balancing the workload, and protecting the jobs of team members is not possible without heijunka.”
- Toyota University Lean Video – This video shows one of the lean training simulations developed by the experts at Toyota. As you can see, the game uses toy car manufacturing (what a surprise!) to illustrate pull production.
- The Apple Voice by Zach Holman – “Mechanically, The Apple Voice is characterized by short, declarative sentences that are informally and personally delivered to you with a hint of smugness.
Our most amazing iPhone yet. 10,000 songs in your pocket. We think you’ll like it.
- The End of a Job as We Know It by Josh Bersin – “Have you created enough flexibility in the organization to empower people to develop expertise and bring it to your customers? Do you encourage continuous learning and learning from mistakes? Do you reward expertise and functional depth?”
- 6 Ways to Improve Problem Solving in Your Company by Jeff Hajek – “Change is extremely hard. And many new processes take time to work out all the bugs. There is a high risk period of time right after a change is made where the challenges of the new processes combined with the comfort of the old draw people backwards. Follow-up is crucial to keep teams from backsliding.”
- SaaS: Change starts easy and then gets really hard Jason Fried – This is why change gets really hard as a SaaS [Software as a Service] product matures. Existing customer expectations are some of the strongest forces pushing back at a company with new ideas.”
- Pull Consulting: Immediate Management Consulting As You Need It by John Hunter – “If you have any questions on a particular topic you would like answered today or if you want to arrange coaching on specific topics over a period of time or help planning a project or someone to bounce your ideas off give this consulting as you need it model a try.”
