Blog posts on management

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• My First Trip To Japan by Peter Scholtes

  At the Aisin Seiki Company:

  Throughout the plant were the charts and graphs we had come to expect in companies pursuing quality. Each work station had formed it storage for tools, warning systems telling when drills should be changed and systems to assure the reorder of parts when the supply was low. Their kanban system applied not only to the component on which they were working, but to the drills, etc. which they used in their work.

  I recommend reading Peter’s full report which includes thoughts on visits to: Toyota, Yokogawa Hewlett-Packard, Takeanaka Komuten, Kansai Electric Company and more.

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• Management Tools for Quality Improvement Succeed When Practicing Respect for People

  An article, by my father, also addresses this area very well, while explaining how to capture and improve using two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity. It is only by engaging the minds of everyone that the tools of “technical” quality will result in even a decent fraction of the benefit they potentially can provide if used well.

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• Applying Toyota Kata to Agile Retrospectives

  Retrospectives are a good method to help improve but if there is no time to think about the issues raised and come up with experiments to improve and review of whether those experiments worked or not and why failure to improve is the expected result.

  Creating a culture where it is expected that any improvement ideas are tested and evaluated is one of the most important changes on the path to a company that will be able to continually improve.

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• Riding a Bike and the Theory of Knowledge

  This video is a wonderfully visual example of how hard it can be for us to drop our ingrained habits and pick up new ones. When you watch this think about management concepts that are so difficult to drop that managers feel like this person trying to ride a bike.

  The bike looks just like any other bike but reacts in a different way to the bike riders actions. But that small adjustment on how the bike reacts is very challenging to overcome and makes you very uncomfortable while you try to make sense of this odd new system.

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• Bringing Lean Principles to Service Industries

  Iteration is very important. It is important in proper use of the PDSA cycle – many quick iterations are much better than one long slow one. And for software application development it is an excellent strategy.

  I think iteration is even more important in software application development than most other areas (for now anyway) because many stakeholders cannot visualize what they need from software. Therefore attempts to force rigid requirements up front fail...

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• Examine the Results of Your Testing Practices and Continually Improve Your Methods

  The idea of delibrately examining your software development and testing practices will be familar to those using agile retrospectives. The power of continually improving the development practices used withing the organization is hard to appreciate but it is immense. The gains compound over time so the initial benefits are only a glimpse of what can be achieve by continuing to iterate and improve.

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• How to Lead From Any Level In the Organization

  From an interview with me:

  2. Help people solve their problems.

   Similar to helping other people grow their careers is the idea of helping other people to solve their problems. Again, this starts with a clear understanding of your sphere of influence. “It determines what strategies you can pursue, and building your sphere of influence should be part of your decision making process.”

  What it comes down to is proving yourself in this way—and doing so consistently. “It isn’t some secret sauce. Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems. They will be inclined to listen to your ideas.”

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• PBS Documentary: Improving Hospitals

  This rare good news documentary reports on a surprising solution to escalating costs, unnecessary deaths and waste in America’s hospitals. Doctors and nurses tell how they did their best, working overtime, while hospital conditions worsened. They were delighted to learn a new way to improve patient care dramatically and reduce unnecessary deaths, suffering, errors, infections and costs without additional resources or government regulations.

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• Add Constraints to Processes Carefully

  Frequently I see unnecessary constraints creating the edge case excuse. By burdening your process with unnecessary constraints you create edge cases that fail and then use the excuse that each of the edge cases is rare and therefore you can’t justify the expense of fixing them.

  But if you designed the process sensibly in the first place the edge case never would have failed and you wouldn’t need special work arounds for such “edge cases.” A simple example of this is unnecessarily complex web page code that fails if to submit a button without javascript. Yes, a small number of users won’t have enabled all javascript to run (today anyway) so it is an “edge case” to deal with if you don’t have the form work without javascript. But there is no decent reason to have it fail in most cases.

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• Continually Improving Using a Focus on Delighting Customers

  A deep appreciation for the long term needs of your customers and potential customers should guide where in the system to continually improve. And my belief on how to continual improve is to create and continually improving management system with principles of experimentation (with the necessary understanding of what conclusion can be drawn from results and what cannot), an understanding of the organization as a system and respect for people as principles to be guided by to achieve continual improvement.

  Quality practices of experimentation directed at continually improving management practices and internal processes need to be completely integrated with the efforts to continual improve customer delight. Those efforts should be one process and therefore they automatically grow together.

  The success of improvements should be evaluated at the system level (outcome measures not merely efficiency measures). In process measures are useful in adding evaluating improvement and monitoring processes but the end result for the overall system must always remain the primary concern.

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• Interview of Bill Hunter: Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations

  Bill discusses the parallels to how a manager applying management improvement principles is very similar to an educator facilitating adult learning. Rather than an authoritarian approach where the boss tells subordinates what to do a manager helps employees achieve better results by supporting their efforts.

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• The Lazy Unreasonable Man

  My view of myself places me in both of these camps (lazy and unreasonable). But, honestly, I have become more reasonable over time and while it makes me less difficult to put up with I think I am less effective...

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• Joy in Work – Software Development

  Software programmers are more likely to really enjoy what they do. There are many reasons for this not the least of which is that they have a fair amount of control over their careers. If they don’t like what they are asked to do, the tools they are asked to work with… they will (more than others) leave for another job.

  Some managers get frustrated that such people are not willing to put up with the normal bother everyone else seems willing to accept (programmers are often “unreasonable”). But I see an occupation that is more focused on joy in work than most. And creating joy in work is what managers should be worrying about – not getting troublemakers to fall into line.

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• Don't Claim Your Customer's Suffering from Your Management System Results are a "Learning Opportunity"

  If you force the consequences of mistakes on your customers making up excuses about how this failure is a learning experience for you is only ok if you actually spell out how you are changing to assure you don't fail your customers due to this same management system failure again.
  
  You need to design your systems to minimize consequences to customers when something goes wrong.
  
  Acting as though a problem is due to some specific issue only with the exact circumstances that created the consequences is exactly the message you expect from businesses that have no respect for customers.

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• Looking Back at "Some Notes on Management in a Hospital" by W. Edwards Deming

  The head nurse returned to say that the nurse that was to give the infusion had recorded the infusion as given. It is possible that she recorded it in advance, with the intention to give it, and did not correct the record. Is this the regular procedure, to record intentions? Who would know?      An unsuspecting physician, looking at the record for his patient, would assume that the infusion had been given, and could draw wrong inferences about how the patient had been doing on the drug. In my case, as it turned out, no harm. But how would he know? A nurse, or a physician, has a right to suppose that the medication was delivered as ordered and as recorded.

  What is the purpose of the record? To inform the physician about intentions, or to tell him what happened?

  It is even more difficult than usual to avoid blaming people when you are being forced to suffer. But even in this situation Dr. Deming understood the problems were a natural result of poor processes not of failures by individuals to do their best.

  continue reading: Looking Back at "Some Notes on Management in a Hospital" by W. Edwards Deming