Blog posts on continual improvement

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Continual Improvement

  ...the continual improvement process

  • must be never ending
  • must focus daily on how any process can be improved
  • must focus on adopting improvement systemically (not just locally, by one person or team)
  • must focus on discontinuous improvement which could include high energy kaizen events and dramatic innovation must include a study phase (PDSA) where the improvements are evaluated to determine whether they actually achieved the predicted results and
  • must include improvement of the improvement process itself

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• Toyota’s Commitment

  The Toyota Way is a management philosophy involving 14 principles that is the essence of the DNA of our organization and really all those who make up the company. In its basic form, the Toyota Way boils down to two fundamental practices: Respect for People and Continuous Improvement.

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• How to Build a Great Software Development Team

  "Without confidence, honest debate about ideas is suppressed as people are constantly taking things personally instead of trying to find the best ideas (and if doing so means my idea is criticized that is ok).

  ...

  This is also one of many areas where the culture within the team was self reinforcing. As new people came on they understood this practice. They saw it in practice. They could see it was about finding good ideas and if their idea was attacked they didn’t take it nearly as personally as most people do in most places."

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• Zero Defects

  I agree that eliminating defects that get to customers (and even those that don’t) is wise. But I think that doing so is the result of continually improving your processes. I do not believe you succeed by declaring your goal to be zero defects. You succeed by creating a culture of never ending improvement, of customer focus, of fact based decision making, of learning...

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• Change is not Improvement

  The Improvement Guide: the Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance, is an excellent handbook on making changes that are improvements rather than just a way to create the illusion of progress. The book uses three simple questions to frame the improvement strategy.

  • What are we trying accomplish?
  • How will we know that a change is an improvement?
  • What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

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• Quality Customer Focus

  Kano model of Customer Satisfaction: Kano saw three types of customer satisfaction: required (basic quality also threshold requirements), more is better (performance quality) and delighter (excitement quality).

  Customers expectations change over time. Often what was once enough to delight a customer (remote control for a TV) becomes expected...

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• How Toyota Turns Workers Into Problem Solvers

  ...The main difficulty is not a knowledge gap, but a performance gap. Most of what Toyota does has been published in numerous booksThe Toyota Way, The Machine That Changed the World and articles (see Curious Cat links to books and articles on Toyota’s management ideas). Reading that information is wise, but that is the easy part. The difficult part is actually managing more effectively...

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• Don’t Do What Your Users Say

  You must focus on customers but you must bring thought into how you react. Just doing what they say is likely a bad idea. Ignoring them is also bad. But listening and learning and then adjusting is good.

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• Amazon S3 Failure Analysis

  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service providing web hosting. The cloud computing solution has been used by many organizations successfully. However the solution has experienced some problems including failing for much of the day on July 20, 2008.

  Amazon publically shared their evaluation of the failure and plans to improve.

  During our post-mortem analysis we’ve spent quite a bit of time evaluating what happened, how quickly we were able to respond and recover, and what we could do to prevent other unusual circumstances like this from having system-wide impacts.

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