Category Archives: Quality tools

How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted

Posted on December 6, 2010 by John Hunter

Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them. In fact, I believe most potential improvements efforts may well fail even before they start because people can’t get past this problem. I believe the way … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Popular, Process improvement, Psychology, Quality tools, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

Managing Our Way to Economic Success

Posted on August 23, 2010 by John Hunter

From Managing Our Way to Economic Success, Two Untapped Resources by William G. Hunter, my father. Written in 1986, but still plenty relevant. We have made some good progress, but there is much more to do: we have barely started adopting these ideas systemically. there are two enormously valuable untapped resources in many companies: potential information and employee creativity. The two are connected. One of the best ways to generate potential information to turn it into kinetic information that can … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Economics, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Respect, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Stop Starting and Start Finishing – Jason Yip

Posted on August 5, 2010 by John Hunter

Jason Yip explores the value of reducing work in process and reducing context switching costs to optimize throughput. By designing processes to work on projects serially instead of in parallel we reduce context switching, and other costs, of multitasking. Related: Multi-Tasking: Why Projects Take so Long – The Importance of Making Problems Visible – One piece flow (continuous flow) – Kanban

Posted in Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Software Development, Systems thinking, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

People Cannot Multitask

Posted on May 24, 2010 by John Hunter

There is plenty of research showing that people can’t multitask. But this knowledge is missed by many people. Here is another study showing this: Why We Can’t Do 3 Things at Once That’s because, when faced with two tasks, a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) divides so that half of the region focuses on one task and the other half on the other task. This division of labor allows a person to keep track … Continue reading →

Posted in Psychology, Quality tools | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Mistake Proofing Deployment of Software Code

Posted on May 19, 2010 by John Hunter

This is a continuation of my previous post: Improving Software Development with Automated Tests. Lets look at a typical poka-yoke example. A USB connector must be put in the right way up – for the connection to work properly and the communication to occur as intended. So to mistake proof the process the connector won’t allow the USB device to be put in upside down – the hardware connection designed to not allow that type of connection. Using a deployment … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Quality tools, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Combinatorial Testing – The Quadrant of Massive Efficiency Gains

Posted on May 17, 2010 by John Hunter

My brother, Justin Hunter, gives a lightning talk on Combinatorial Testing – The Quadrant of Doom and The Quadrant of Massive Efficiency Gains in the video above. The following text is largely directly quoted from the talk – with a bit of editing by me. When you have a situation that has many many many possible parameters and each time only a few possible choices (a few items you are trying to vary and test – in his example in … Continue reading →

Posted in Quality tools, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Nice Non-technical Control Chart Webcast

Posted on April 28, 2010 by John Hunter

This very brief introduction to control charts by PQ Systems provides a very watchable non-technical overview. Getting people to understand variation is important, and not easy. This video is one more quick reminder for those still trying to incorporate an understanding of variation into their view of the world. The idea is simple. But actually thinking with an understanding of variation people find difficult, it seems to me. It is very easy to continue to revert to special cause thinking … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Systems thinking, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Toyota’s Journey to Lean Software Development

Posted on March 18, 2010 by John Hunter

Toyota’s journey from Waterfall to Lean software development by Henrik Kniberg Toyota builds cars (duh). In the past that didn’t involve much software, and the little software that was needed was mostly developed by suppliers and embedded in isolated components. Toyota assembled them and didn’t much care about the software inside. But “The importance of automatic electronic control system has been increasing dramatically year by year” said Ishii-san. A modern car is pretty much a computer on wheels! In a … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Quality tools, Software Development, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , ,

Improving Software Development with Automated Tests

Posted on March 8, 2010 by John Hunter

Automated software testing is a mistake proofing (poka-yoke) solution for software development. The way automated testing works is that software code is written that tests the software code of the application. This automated testing code test that business rules are correctly being followed by the code in the application. So for example, a user should not be able to create a new account without entering password. Then you create code that does not allow an account to be created without … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Lean thinking, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Software Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Understanding Psychology: Slogans – Risky Tools

Posted on February 3, 2010 by John Hunter

Slogans mainly are bad. But like most things they can be used in ways that help or hurt. The main problem is when they substitute for a method to achieve the aim (most of the time). If the slogan serves like a mission statement to focus people on something useful to focus on and it is one minor part of a system to achieve a result it can be fine and even useful. The issue, to me, is not so … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Psychology, Quality tools, quote, Respect | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Prophet Unheard: Dr. W. Edwards Deming – 1992

Posted on January 25, 2010 by John Hunter

[embedded webcast links removed because they have been removed from YouTube. To see video with W. Edwards Deming see the Deming Institute YouTube channel.] This is an interesting video on Deming and American management (by the BBC in 1992): Prophet Unheard. It includes some nice old footage of Deming in Japan. The importance of respect for people is clear and the video also touches on the idea the danger of relying on data (when you do not understand variation and … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Manufacturing, Quality tools, Respect | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Video Overview of the PDSA Cycle

Posted on December 20, 2009 by John Hunter

Robert Lloyd, PhD From the IHI Open School‘s, presents a nice overview of the PDSA Cycle (plan-do-study-act). The webcast includes an example of using PDSA to improve the discharge process for a hospital. As I have said many times the keys to success are to turn the PDSA cycle rapidly, predict the results in advance, and analyze the results to continually improve. the Improvement Handbook is an excellent resource. The IHI Open School is a great resource and exactly the … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Health care, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Science, webcast | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Communicating with the Visual Display of Data

Posted on October 26, 2009 by John Hunter

Anscombe’s quartet: all four sets are identical when examined statistically, but vary considerably when graphed. Image via Wikipedia. ___________________ Anscombe’s quartet comprises four datasets that have identical simple statistical properties, yet are revealed to be very different when inspected graphically. Each dataset consists of eleven (x,y) points. They were constructed in 1973 by the statistician F.J. Anscombe to demonstrate the importance of graphing data before analyzing it, and of the effect of outliers on the statistical properties of a dataset. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Quality tools, Statistics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15%

Posted on August 17, 2009 by John Hunter

Google does a great job of using statistical and engineering principles to improve. It is amazing how slow we are to adopt new ideas but because we are it provides big advantages to companies like Google that use concepts like design of experiments, experimenting quickly and often… while others don’t. Look Inside a 1,024 Recipe Multivariate Experiment A few weeks ago, we ran one of the largest multivariate experiments ever: a 1,024 recipe experiment on 100% of our US-English homepage. … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Design of Experiments, Google, IT, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, quote, Science, Software Development, Statistics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Baking in Quality to Software Development

Posted on August 15, 2009 by John Hunter

One of the reasons my organizations switched to Ruby on Rails for software development was the great integration with automated testing. We always wanted to have good test coverage on our software applications (which are web applications – some used only inside our organization) but didn’t actually find the time to do so. Since we adopted Ruby we have been doing much better in this regard. It isn’t just the switch to Ruby, of course, but the switch to Ruby … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Software Development | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t Hide Problems in Computers

Posted on August 11, 2009 by John Hunter

Making things visible is a key to effective management. And data in computers can be easy to ignore. Don’t forget to make data visible. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston recently hosted Hideshi Yokoi, president of the Toyota Production System Support Center and wrote this blog post: Together, we visited gemba and observed several hospital processes in action, looking for ways to reduce waste and reorganize work. It was fascinating to have such experts here … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Quality tools, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments