Involve IT Staff in Business Process Improvement

Posted on July 6, 2010 by John Hunter

I started out basically working on management improvement from the start of my career. My makeup (I am never satisfied and figure things should always be better) along with a few traits, experiences and probably even genes made this a natural fit for me. I tend to take the long view and find fire fighting a waste of time. Why fix some symptom, I want to fix the system so that problem doesn’t happen again. My father worked in statistics, engineering and business improvement and as I was growing up I had plenty of experience with process improvement, understanding variation, experimenting, measuring results…

I came into the IT world as I had needs and found the best solution was to write some software to help me accomplish what I wanted to. One thing that better software tools allowed is this type of thing when organizations failed to use technology well, individuals could just do so themselves. Without these tools people had to rely on the organization, but today atrophied IT organizations can often be circumvented. Though the IT organizations often try to avoid this largely by bans (instead of by providing the tools people need), which is not a good sign, in my opinion.

I then spent more and more of my time working with technology but I always retained my focus on improving the management of the organization, with technology playing a supporting role in that effort. That is true even as where I sat changed. And I have become more convinced organizations would be served well by using the information technology staff as business process experts.

At one point I sat in the Office of Secretary of Defense, Quality Management Office where I was able to focus on management improvement and using technology to aid that effort. Then I went to the White House Military Office, Customer Support and Organizational Development office and focused largely on how to using technology to meet the mission. Then I was moved into the White House Military Office, Office of Information Technology Management.

And now I work for the American Society for Engineering Education in the Information Technology department. My role started as partially program management and partially software development and as we have grown and hired more software developers I am now nearly completely a program manager.

I believe technology is a central component of understanding business processes today. But the truth is, many business people don’t have as complete an understanding as I feel they should. Now I believe, most anyone interested in planning their management career needs to develop a facility with technology and specifically how to use software applications to improve performance. You don’t need to be an expert programmer but you need to understand the strengths, weakness, limits of technical solutions. You need to understand how technology can be used (and the risks of options).

At the same time I just don’t think it is likely management everywhere will get a decent understanding of application software development. I also believe that in many cases organizations should do software development in house. This is a issue that certainly can be argued (but I won’t do it here). Basically I don’t think organizations should cram their processes into designs required by off the shelf software. Instead I believe they should design processes optimal for their organization and using off the shelf software often does the opposite (forces the process decisions around what software someone decided to buy). There is plenty of use for off the shelf software that doesn’t force you to make your processes fit into them (and sometimes even if it does that is the business decision that has to be made – I just think far too often organizations look at short term costs and not the overall best solutions for the system).
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Posted in Career, Deming, IT, Management, Popular, Process improvement, quote, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Improving the Recruitment Process

Posted on July 3, 2010 by John Hunter

I have thought the recruiting process for hiring staff was very inefficient. I still think it is very inefficient. Not only do companies waste time or resources we also do not do a good job systemically placing the right people in the right jobs effectively. So there is waste is the process of hiring and also a huge amount of waste in not doing well at finding the best fits for people and jobs. So we have lots of jobs filled with people that are less suited to them than others that would love to be doing the job (and who would do very well) if they had only known about it.

[the broken video link has been removed]

The webcast shows an interview with Gerry Crispin. Interesting statistic he mentioned: without an employee referral a candidate had chances of 200-500 to 1 of being hired, with employee referrals they are about 10-15 to 1. He also said about 30% have employee referrals. Honestly the video doesn’t help me too much but I am desperate to have us improve in this area and maybe others can get more than I can from it. If staff are important to your organization, doing a great job getting the best people for your company should be a process you are proud of. I don’t see many examples of organizations that do this well.

via: Recruitment is a Commodity. Make it an Experience! [the broken link has been removed]

Related: Job Listings Online Filled with Jargon – Interviewing and Hiring Programmers – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? – Find management improvement jobs – The Software Developer Labor Market

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Management Improvement Carnival #102

Posted on July 1, 2010 by John Hunter

photo of Red shouldered hawk

  • 12 Things Good Bosses Believe by Robert I. Sutton – “My success – and that of my people – depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.” [I think this is so true. Ever manager should repeat this over and over every day until they give the boring details the attention it deserves over the flashy stuff – John].
  • Should You Use a Business/IT Liaison Person? No! by Harwell Thrasher – “Prioritize your business needs so that IT can focus its limited resources on the most important things. Many liaison positions are really just ways of coping with a lack of business priorities”
  • 5 Ways to Improve Your Teaching Skills by Ron Pereira – “If you don’t have a deep understanding of the content you’re about to present I suggest you take the time to gain a deep understanding of the material. In other words, you should have some real life, practical experiences to share with the students.”
  • A breadth of fresh error by Mark Anderson – “it’s vital that experts convey the possible variability in their findings if we are to gain a true picture of what may, indeed, transpire.”
  • Shorten and Reduce Variability in Lead Times using Kanban by Dennis Stevens – “Reducing variability in lead time will allow you to consistently know and commit when something can be delivered. Delivering consistently will help to increase the trust within the system.”
  • Customer Service: Showing You Care by Wally Bock – “Your team’s job is to improve the service you deliver to your customers, inside and outside the organization. Make it a point to get out, to call customers, to ask questions and then listen.”
  • Thoughts on two months of pairing by Sarah Mei – “I don’t take shortcuts. I write the tests first. I refactor code that needs it. I focus on doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, without being sloppy. I make sure I understand what I’m doing before I do it.”
  • Of Team Size, Social Loafing and Lack of Direction by Mark Hamel – “Well executed kaizen is an opportunity for folks to improve the business. It’s also equally about improving the worker’s PDCA skill-sets and developing a lean culture. When teams are too large and they suffer the above described dynamics, we end up squandering these transformative opportunities.”

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The Illusion of Knowledge

Posted on June 28, 2010 by John Hunter

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. – Daniel J. Boorstin

Great quote on a topic I discussed in, How We Know What We Know. Dr. Deming included the theory of knowledge as one of the 4 pillars of his management system. When you do not question what you think you know, and conventional thinking, that will keep you from discovery. Now much of conventional wisdom is right, so you often do well accepting whatever most people believe. But to discover you have to seek out new knowledge. And often the process is stopped before you even form the questions, because you think you have knowledge.

How can you understand if your beliefs are in fact knowledge? Test them. Do you have evidence that performance appraisals add value to your organization? Do you have evidence that outsourcing production is beneficial? Do you have evidence that paying CEOs a king’s ransom is helping? What evidence do you have that sales bonuses help the organization? If you don’t have evidence then you have a belief, not knowledge. You can be ignorant and hold a correct belief. Knowledge requires understanding not just correctness. At least that is how I see it, I am not sure what the philosophers say about this.

I also believe you can have evidence that seems to support your belief but still be wrong. You could site examples where sales bonuses seemed to stimulate extra sales that helped your company. But you could be failing to understand the full system and the other factors that 1) helped make the sale and 2) what damage the sales bonuses did that you didn’t consider. Knowledge isn’t easy. But most that are knowledgeable seek to question their beliefs and assumptions.

Related: Bogus Theories, Bad for Business – The Illusion of Understanding – Flaws in Understanding Psychology Lead to Flawed Management – confirmation bias – Pragmatism and Management Knowledge – Optical Illusions and Other Illusions

Certainty is risky. But I am also basically certain about many things (and think that is wise). I don’t have any doubt about how gravity it going to act on what I see in my daily life. I don’t doubt if I don’t take in liquids for days I will suffer and die eventually. I don’t doubt in trying to manage an organization you need to account for the psychology of people.
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Management Blog Posts From June 2006

Posted on June 26, 2010 by John Hunter

photo of Jack the cat and a bear

  • Management Advice Failures – It is amazing to me how often we accept non-solutions. If someone objects that we have tried that “solution” and it didn’t work they are often shut down with a version of: “don’t be negative” or “I don’t want to hear we tried that before and it didn’t work” (we are different now) or “we need team players” or “if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem”…
  • Edward Tufte’s new book: Beautiful Evidence – Another great book by Tufte in which he explores how to best display evidence looking at: mapped pictures; sparklines; links and causal arrows; words, numbers and pictures together; the fundamental principles of analytical design; corruption of evidence; and more.
  • More on Obscene CEO Pay – In the 1960’s and a970’s CEO of the largest companies made about 35 times what an average worker did. In the last 15 years they are making 200 times as much. They in no way deserve too.
  • Signs You Have a Great Job… or Not – “When someone is learning a new skill they will often need to spend time developing (which mean they won’t be doing what they do best). Again this is expected but managers, by and large, don’t do enough to support development in my opinion.”
  • Trust: Respect for People – “A bit different than laying off tens of thousands of workers and then taking huge bonuses. And in case you don’t know, I think Toyota’s approach is more honorable and what should be aimed for…”
  • Tesco: Lean Provision – “Tesco’s lean provision system combines point-of-sale data, cross-dock distribution centers, and frequent deliveries to many stores along “milk-runs” to stock the right items in a range of retail formats.”
  • Bad Arguments Against a Gas Tax – the increased prices, which have the same negative impact of a tax increase go to foreign producers and the oil companies instead of the taxpayers. We would have been better off increasing the gas tax 50 cents a gallon and cutting the huge deficit instead of accepting such arguments that a gas tax would kill the economy.

The photo shows a tabby cat that chased a bear up a tree.

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Trust Your Staff to Make Decisions

Posted on June 22, 2010 by John Hunter

The failure to give your organization the flexibility to serve customers is a big mistake. Many companies make this mistake. Often the basic problem is managers don’t trust that their systems to hire and develop people that will make good decisions. The solution to this problem is not to give your staff no authority. The solution is to manage your systems so that you can trust your people. This is not as easy to do as it is to say, I will grant that.

Southwest Airlines and Zappos are companies that do respect employees. And those employees then provide great service. But it isn’t a simple thing. To truly manage a system with respect for people isn’t as easy as just putting up some slogans. But if you want to provide good customer service this is one requirement. There are plenty of others: continual improvement, evidence based management, customer focus, systems thinking…

These thoughts were prompted by a nice post, jetBlue Just Blew It

You see, when I booked my flight last night I used their online system (good) and made a mistake in booking the date for my return (bad). I’m going to Boston for the weekend and accidently booked by return flight a month later in August instead of the 4 days I was looking for.

Of course their site has a lot of bookings and almost no one makes an error like this. But any UI designer who looks at their site could see that it’s absolutly possible since the length of the trip is never revealed except for the flight dates. (I”m arguing that they could put in a little fading header that tells you how long your trip is for.) If’ I’d see anywhere that my trip was scheduled for 35 days I’d have immediately know there was an issue. (I could make a simple change to the jetBlue UI that would solve this problem for everyone within a day.)

Today when I looked at my emailed itinerary I immediately spotted the problem and went online to change my ticket. They have a $100 change fee which I paid thinking I’d give them a call and that surely they’d waive that. After all, it wasn’t a change I was asking for, it was the ticket I wanted in the first place. It was less than 24 hours and the flight wasn’t for a month.

But no.

In speaking to the customer service rep who ‘called’ a manager. I was informed that I had only a 4 hour window to make any changes and that after that, there was nothing anyone could do. You see, no one at jetBlue customer service has the ‘authority’ to refuse this fee. It was company policy that they couldn’t actually do anything.

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Posted in Customer focus, Management, Respect, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Management Improvement Carnival #101

Posted on June 20, 2010 by John Hunter

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

  • Why C level executives don’t engage in lean by Steven Spear – “Either they’ve been led to believe that it is the work of the shop floor technocrats for which their responsibility is hiring and funding, or they’re unprepared to lead, engaged in discovery and development, as is actually required.”
  • A Systems Approach to Business by Gregg Stocker – “Coach and mentor people to increase the level of understanding throughout the company regarding how each job supports other areas in the achieving the fundamental purpose.”
  • Toyota to Reduce Span of Control in Engineering by Jon Miller – “Shoichiro Toyoda, the father of current Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, who is leading this latest reorganization towards smaller span of control for engineers.”
  • Some Bosses Live in a Fool’s Paradise by Bob Sutton – “It turns out that followers, peers, superiors, and customers consistently provide better information about a boss’s strengths, weaknesses, and quirks than the boss him or herself.”
  • Effective root cause analysis techniques by Gojko Adzic – “After the initial set of problems is identified, start popping the why stack and get to the “fifth why”. Every moment you should be either writing down why something happened or asking ‘Why?’. This keeps the discussions short and focused.”
  • The Theory of Constraints: The Fundamentals by Pete Abilla – “The rate of throughput is determined by the system’s constraint… If Internal: eliminate waste at the constraint; place inspection steps upstream from the constraint; and other methods to free-up the constraint from non-value activities.”
  • Motivation, Insight, and Introspection by Mike Cottmeyer – “To maintain passion and enthusiasm for my craft, I have to contribute, I have to feel like I am making a difference, and I can’t feel like every interaction is something to be monetized.”
  • The Role of Middle Management in Toyota or a Lean System by Tracey Richardson – “The traditional mindset of most management (all levels) is that the team member ‘works for them’ on a daily basis. The paradigm shift in thinking comes when the mindset becomes – ‘I work for them’.”

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Problems With Student Evaluations as Measures of Teacher Performance

Posted on June 16, 2010 by John Hunter

Dr. Deming was, among other things a professor. He found the evaluation of professors by students an unimportant (and often counterproductive measure) – used in some places for awards and performance appraisal. He said for such a measure to be useful it should survey students 20 years later to see which professors made a difference to the students. Here is an interesting paper that explored some of these ideas. Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors by Scott E. Carrell, University of California, Davis and National Bureau of Economic Research; and James E. West, U.S. Air Force Academy:

our results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes. Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value”added but positively correlated with follow”on course value”added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a doctorate perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course but perform worse in the follow”on related curriculum.

Student evaluations are positively correlated with contemporaneous professor value”added and negatively correlated with follow”on student achievement. That is, students appear to reward higher grades in the introductory course but punish professors who increase deep learning (introductory course professor value”added in follow”on courses). Since many U.S. colleges and universities use student evaluations as a measurement of teaching quality for academic promotion and tenure decisions, this latter finding draws into question the value and accuracy of this practice.

These findings have broad implications for how students should be assessed and teacher quality measured.

Related: Applying Lean Tools to University Courses – K-12 Educational Reform – Improving Education with Deming’s Ideas – Learning, Systems and Improvement – How We Know What We Know

Posted in Deming, Education, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Southwest Not Delta or United

Posted on June 14, 2010 by John Hunter

One of the posts highlighted in the last post was one example of how Southwest behaves. It wasn’t a one time thing. It was a common result of the system Southwest has in place where they treat customers like human beings that should be respected (as Southwest does with employees).

Then you have the typical horrible treatment the other airlines practice. Like this example where Delta damages this guys bike and refuses to accept responsibility. That is until they suffered a huge amount of additional ill will over such horrible treatment of James Lawrence, who is participating in 20 half iron mans to raise money to help provide systems to provide water for those in Africa in need of it.

Which is similar to when United broke the guitar of this guy, except United I guess figured more bad publicity really doesn’t matter given that it seems to basically be their business plan. On the bright side if you do a good job of complaining you can actually do well. But thousands of people (probably tens or hundreds of thousands) suffer the results of systems destine to provide horrible service.

Systems of people function in repeatably ways. Based on the horrible service airlines provide you can be almost certain their managers do not treat employees with respect. When organizations treat front line staff as costs that need to be minimized and as unthinking, untrustworthy problems they will almost certainly pass on the bad treatment to customers.

Related: Airline Managers Disrespect Customers – Customers Get Dissed and Tell – Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines – Very Bad Customer Service from Discover Card

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Management Improvement Carnival #100

Posted on June 10, 2010 by John Hunter

I started the management improvement blog carnival in 2006. At the time the number of blogs posting useful management ideas had already grown to a large number. It took years after I started my Curious Cat Management Improvement site, in 1996, to have even a handful of consistently useful web sites for those interested in improving the management of organizations.

Blogs really started the explosion of good management content online. Now we have more great blogs nearly every month. This jumbo sized edition could be much larger and still not run out of great posts to include. Hopefully the regular carnivals help you keep up with great management posts from blogs you already enjoy, and introduce you to new blogs to add to you RSS (blog feed) reader.

Photo of Arches National Park

Arches National Park by John Hunter, Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog

  • What’s Deming Got To Do With Agile? by Dennis Stevens – “If you equate Kanban with manufacturing you won’t be successful. You need to understand what Deming has to say about knowledge work and how management is responsible for creating an environment for success. Kanban brings an easy to implement – low friction implementation of Deming’s philosophy.”
  • Remember – We Want to See Problems by Bryan Zeigler – “Well if you designed your system to truly follow the lean ideals, you have problems! That’s the whole point! Make your problems visible instead of hiding them with inventory, extra labor, long lead times, etc.”
  • Control Systems and Feedback Loops by Tom Foster – “why don’t we change this control system into a feedback loop? Why don’t we have the feedback loop tell the team, and why don’t we run the feedback loop in real time? The manager just gets in the way.”
  • My Favorite Southwest Airlines Moment by Rachel Barry – ” If you live with gratitude, you will have reached life’s highest ideals. And your letter is grateful. You are a wonderful woman. Thank you, thank you, for being you and for writing me. The truth is, it just doesn’t get any better than that. ” (Southwest encourages people to act like people [and treat customers like people not numbers] instead of cogs in a machine. Not amazing when put that way but when contrasted with most other large companies it is an amazing difference. – John)
  • Organizational Kryptonite: Fear of Confrontation by Kris Dunn – “Because the world is full of people who suffer from fear of confrontation, giving good, direct, honest feedback in a professional way is often the best way to stand out as someone who can be trusted.”
  • The False Theory of Meritocracy by Nigel Nicholson – “A true theory of meritocracy would acknowledge that we all have multiple talents and motivations; and that we all can learn and improve in most of the roles in which we are placed — though how much and how fast will vary from person to person.”
  • Corporate Renewal, Waste, and Turnaround by Pete Abilla – “Each of us has a responsibility to improve those areas where we have influence. Given that, what are you going to do today to improve the business you are in? Help the people you work with? Improve the world around you?”
  • Show Me the Results by Mike Wroblewski – “Despite our efforts to make all results objective and quantifiable, in many cases, subjectivity remains. Overlooking this problem, we obsess over results… In our obsession with results, do we actually miss something, perhaps something greater?”
  • Drucker’s Surprising View of Corporate Social Responsibility by William Cohen – “Drucker concluded that considerations for workers in and out of the workplace were the responsibility of the corporate leader just as much as the profits, survival, and growth of the business or organization. Therefore, he taught that there were social responsibilities of business.”

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