Blog posts on management system

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

• Public Sector Management Using Deming's Ideas

  Madison’s quality improvement efforts began after then-Mayor James F. Sensenbrenner and his staff were exposed to the teaching of W. Edwards Deming in 1983. A pilot project at the motor equipment division made substantial improvements in prioritizing repairs, improving communications with customers, reducing steps in the inventory purchasing process and, ultimately, reducing vehicle down time, all of which saved money and improved service at the same time. Based on the success of the pilot, it was decided to expand the philosophy throughout city government.

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• Organization, Systems and Culture

  Management improvement is mainly about using great ideas that have been around for years and decades.

  Useful, innovative new management ideas are great. But far too much effort is placed in trying to package "systems" (or copyrighted terms) as some new breakthrough in management when most often they offer little of value.

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• Dell Falls Short

  Don’t give management a free pass just because they cave in to short term thinking. Management should know better and has a responsibility to do better. It is predictable that if management fails to setup an effective management system that they will fall victim to short term thinking. Still that doesn’t mean they are not responsible for making decisions. They are the managers of the company not some analyst on Wall Street.

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• Lean National Health System

  This is an example of focusing on improving the system which will then result in improved measures (cost savings for example). This systems approach contrasts with cutting costs by cutting every budget by 5% across the board which often fails. Without improvements in the system reducing budgets just reduces capability.

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• Edward Tufte’s new book: Beautiful Evidence (2006)

  Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte is now available. Beautiful is the right word. Tufte’s books are an example of what can be created when someone truly loves what they do and takes pride in every detail of their work. His books are excellent.

  In Beautiful Evidence, Tufte 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.

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• CEO Flight Attendant

  This getting out and seeing work in action is exposed a great deal, including a lean management concept, Genchi Genbutsu – to go to see the problem in situ (not just reading a report about it).

  The success of many management practices is more a matter of how the practice is done than if it is done. Also the success depends on the rest of the management system. Practices cannot just be copied. But you can learn from what others find useful and figure out how that idea would work within your organization.

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• Learning from Customers

  Create a management system focused on continual improvement that is engaged in seeking out customer feedback and continually improving the value provided to customers.

  Most organizations do the opposite of this. They make put many barriers in the way of customers speaking to anyone that will listen. They put systems in place to discourage feedback from customers.

  ...

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• Ex-Toyota Manager Consulting with Porsche in 1994

  While respect for people is an important part of the Toyota Production System, the practice of former Toyota managers were often the "tough love" variety. Today, many people are often too timid, in my opinion, to call out things that need to be improved for fear of making someone uncomfortable. Where that balance properly lies though is based on the culture of the organization (and what needs to be done - occasionally there is a need to "shake people up" in order to make change take place more effectively).

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• Profound Podcast with John Hunter, Part Two

  In this podcast I discussed my thoughts on management improvement, Deming, respect for people, systems thinking and more.
  

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• What Is Muda?

  And the biggest waste of all is the underutilization of people’s talents. If you just learn to ask people for their ideas and get them to participate in creative problem-solving activities, you will be amazed at what people can do.

  Norman Bodek

  I agree: "Two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity. Managing Our Way to Economic Success, William G. Hunter, 1987. Also "The greatest waste in America is failure to use the ability of people." W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, 1982.

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• Going lean Brings Long-term Payoffs

  The early successes provide resources to invest in making large more fundamental changes to the organization. Those successes also help convince people these lean ideas have merit. Dilbert does a good job of illustrating how many workers feel about the latest words spoken by their management. Without visible success expecting employees to believe the new management practices is unwise.

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• Creating and Sustaining Great Management Systems

  It is hard enough to create and sustain great management systems without adding more challenges to achieving success. When the management system results in having credit for each success fought over (to allocate credit to whoever convinces others they deserve the credit) it is much harder.

  This is one of the many ways Performance appraisals schemes (where people have to claim responsibility for successes in order to get more cash) create problems.

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• Sub-optimize a Part to Optimize the Whole

  ...choosing to sub optimize a part to optimize the whole. One of management’s roles is to determine when to trade a loss to one part of the system for the sake of the overall system. One of the big losses for software development is interruptions which distract developers.

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• European Blackout: Human Error-Not

  The focus seems to be that we didn’t do anything wrong, just some “human” made an error, which seems to be implied is out of their control. Why would the organization not be responsible for the people and the system working together? Management needs to create systems that works. That system includes people and equipment and process management and suppliers

  …

  If management tries to claim a failure was due to "human error" they have to provide me a great deal more evidence on why the system was designed to allow that error (given that they say the error is "human" implies that they believe the system should have been able to cope with the situation). Requesting that evidence is the first thing reporters should ask any time they are given such excuses. At which time I imagine the response options are:

  1. no comment
  2.  we had considered this situation and looked at the likelihood of such an event, the cost of protecting against it (mistake proofing) and the cost of failure meant and decided that it wasn't worth the cost of preventing such failures
  3. we didn't think about it
  4. we think it is best not to design systems to be robust and mistake proof but rather rely on people to never make any mistakes

  What they will likely say is we have these 3 procedures in place to prevent that error.
  Are they every followed? You have something written on paper, big deal? What actually happens?
  Yes they are always followed by everybody, this one time was the only time ever that it was not followed. Why?
  This person made a mistake.
  Why did the system allow that mistake to be made?
  What? You can't expect us to design systems that prevent mistakes from being made.
  Yes I can. That is much more sensible than expecting people never to make a mistake.

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• What one thing could we do to improve?

  Asking “how is everything” normally will get the response: “fine” (which is often that is exactly what the staff wants so they can move on without wasting any time). However, if you really want to improve that doesn’t help.

  To encourage useful feedback, specifically give the customer permission to mention something that could be improved. What one thing could we do better?

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