Blog posts on effective

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• Deming on being Destroyed by Best Efforts

  Best efforts are essential. Unfortunately, best efforts, people charging this way and that way without guidance of principles, can do a lot of damage. Think of the chaos that would come if everyone did his best, not knowing what to do.

      W. Edwards Deming

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• Expand the View of the System to Find Ways to Improve Results

  By expanding the system view and looking at the results of the entire system it is often possible to find improvements that are not possible by only looking at “your” system. These changes can sometimes be more challenging to accomplish as they may require convincing others to make changes.

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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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• Management Excellence

  I think the question of what other companies have management practices worth studying is interesting. The answer could be very helpful as others could learn from what those organizations do. There are at least two difficulties in identifying those organizations: 1) defining what set of criteria would indicate successful organizations 2) most often even companies that are doing many things well leave much to be desired...

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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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• A Good Management System is Robust and Continually Improving

  A good management system doesn’t rely on heroic efforts to save the day. The organization is designed to succeed. It is robust. It will succeed with all the variation thrown at it by the outside world. A good management system takes advantage of the contributions people offer, but it will not perform poorly when others are relied on.

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• Better Meetings

  Meetings are perennial problems. People sit through meetings and then complain about how big a waste of time it was. Here are a couple very simple tips to try and actually improve (instead of just agreeing that meetings are wasteful, but doing nothing to improve).

  • Have an agenda
  • Document decisions

  ...

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• Outcome and In-Process Measures

  An outcome measure is used to measure the success of a system. For example, the outcome measure could be the percentage of people who do not get polio (the result). An output measure, for example, would be the number of people vaccinated with the polio vaccine (the output). Often we measure inputs (amount of money spent) or outputs (number of people vaccinated). They are usually easy to measure but obviously less valuable proxies for what the objective of the system (reducing the incidence of polio).

  ...

  In-process measures can be valuable in providing actionable information sooner than the outcome measure would allow action...

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• Circle of Influence

  You should remember, that there is a temporal component to your circle of influence. On some current issue, I may have a very low chance of success for getting the organization to adopt an improvement I think is best. But certain actions can build the understanding that will allow me later to have more influence. This can even be completely separate from how people normally think of circle of influence. By building an organization that moves toward data based decision making and therefore reduces HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) decision making I increase my ability to influence decision making in the future.

  Long term thinking is a very powerful, and much under-practiced, strategy. Your influence within an organization is limited today but has great potential to expand, if you act wisely.

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• Improving Software Development with Automated Tests

  ... Thus automated testing mistake proofs the process. Now the mistake proofing is only as good as the test that are added. Software development is complex and if the code has an error (based on the business rules) that is not tested then the code can be deployed to production and affect customers. Automated software testing tools are a huge help in preventing many errors from affecting customers.

  It seems pretty obvious but until the widespread adoption of agile software development techniques and frameworks that make it easy to adopt automated testing (like Ruby on Rails) this sensible process improvement tool was used far less often than you would think.

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• Targets Distorting the System

  I still remember Dr. Brian Joiner speaking about process improvement and the role of data well over a decade ago. He spoke of 3 ways to improve the figures: distort the data, distort the system and improve the system. Improving the system is the most difficult.

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