Blog posts on organization as a system

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

• Using Checklists to Reduce Process Variation and Improve Results

  At the core the Checklist Manifesto is about determining the critical process conditions and creating a system to assure that the those process items are properly handled.

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  It is critical that checklists be developed at the gemba (where the real work is done) and that they are modified based on experience. A good checklist system integrates continual improvement to adjust checklists based on user experience.

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• Using Deming’s Ideas When Your Organization Doesn’t

  First, you can transform yourself. You can transform your understanding and how you learn (with an appreciation for the theory of knowledge and what conclusions you can and cannot draw from the data you use). You can transform how you act.

  View your organization with an understanding of Deming’s management ideas. Think of the organization as a system. Even if you can’t persuade others to do this, you doing so will help you understand the situation more clearly and allow you to think of solutions that take advantage of this understanding. System thinking will allow you to find leverage points that can be used to multiply the benefits of improvements.

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• Testing Smarter with Mike Bland

  This interview with Mike Bland is part of my series of “Testing Smarter with…” interviews: gaining insights and experiences from many of the software testing field’s leading thinkers.

  it’s not about defects; it’s about feedback and collaboration. If you arrange incentives to produce an adversarial relationship between team members, e.g. if developers are incentivized to minimize defects and testers are incentivized to report defects, then that’s a house divided against itself.

  Mike Bland aims to produce a culture of transparency, autonomy, and collaboration, in which “Instigators” are inspired and encouraged to make creative use of existing systems to drive improvement throughout an organization. The ultimate goal of such efforts is to make the right thing the easy thing. He's followed this path since 2005, when he helped drive adoption of automated testing throughout Google as part of the Testing Grouplet, the Test Mercenaries, and the Fixit Grouplet.

  my advice to both developers and testers is to identify the priorities, the social structures and dynamics at play in the organization. How can you work with these structures and dynamics instead of against them—or do you need to create a culture of open communication and collaboration in parallel with (or even before) communicating the testing message?

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• The Transformation is Everybody’s Job

  There are quotes you can pick to make it seem like executives are responsible for the system and individuals workers have little impact on overall results – “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” This shows the limitation of isolated quotes more than anything else.

  Complex systems have many leverage points and can be influenced in many ways. It is unreasonable to have a broken management system and blame those working within it for the naturally poor results than such a system creates. And executives have more authority and thus more responsibility for creating a good management system that is continually improving. But such a management system requires that everyone in the organization is contributing.

  Those with authority must modify the management system to allow everyone to contribute. But that doesn’t mean everyone else just sits by waiting for those with more authority to transform the organization. Transformation doesn’t work that way. It is a dynamic, interconnected process. It isn’t as simple as turning on a light (or declaring this is our new transformed management system).

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• Organizations as Social Systems

  Organizations are social systems made up of people.

  Social systems often amplify what happens.

  If good things happen, more good things often follow.

  When bad things happen, more bad things often follow.

  To improve it is wise to this into account and design elements of the management system to encourage the amplification of what is good and that seeks to stop what is bad from being amplified.

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• Podcast: Building Organizational Capability

  From a podcast with me:

  Changing how organizations are managed makes a huge difference in people’s lives, not all the time and I understand most of the time it doesn’t. But when this is done well people can go from dreading going to work to enjoying going to work, not every single day – but most days, and it can change our lives so that most of the time we are doing things that we find valuable and we enjoy instead of just going to work to get a paycheck so we can enjoy the hours that we have away from work.

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• Deadly Disease of Management: Emphasis on Short-term Profits

  The games played to manipulate earnings are enormous (and no surprise to those who understand likely outcome of pressure to meet short term goals is a desire to manipulate the figure rather than improve underlying results). In Profit Beyond Measure by H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms, the authors provide many good thoughts on the problems of accounting measures and management.

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• Educate New Managers on Their New Responsibilities

  Far too often companies promote employees into management positions and expect them to fulfill the obligations of their new position without helping prepare them to meet their new responsibilities. People who excelled at doing their non-supervisory job often have little education or experience to succeed with their new responsibilities.

  Managing a software development team is a completely different job from being a great software developer. Most everyone would acknowledge that: but if you look at what actually happens in many organizations the management system is not setup with this fact in mind.

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• Jobs to be Done

  If you see your job from the customer’s perspective you may change the scope of your offerings. You can add services that help the potential customer chose you. In the book, they explore the example mentioned in the article in more detail. They also discuss how an online university changed their processes to address the issues their potential customers faced in the “hiring” process. They changed, not the “product” (education), but the processes supporting potential students making the decision to hire Southern New Hampshire University.

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• Improving Management with Tools and Knowledge

  Both the tools and the underlying principles are catalysts to better management. Alone each can result in a bit of improvement. But when they are used together is when you see remarkable improvement. The effective integration of the principles and the tools is what separates the remarkable companies we respect (and maybe envy) from all the others that are having some success but that are also struggling in many ways.

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• Software Code Reviews from a Deming Perspective

  I think the “inspection” in code reviews is different enough that we can use code reviews as a valuable tool for managing software development. The waste of having processes that create defects and then use inspection to catch them is certainly something to avoid. A significant part of the effort in code reviews should be geared toward capturing learning that can be applied to current processes to improve them so fewer bugs are created in the future.

  In my experience this part of code reviews (using it to improve the existing processes) is not given the focus it should be. So I do believe that code reviews should focus more on why did we find something we decided to fix?

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• Robots for Health Care from Toyota

  Most often innovation efforts take the form of understanding the jobs your customers are using your products and service for now and developing new solutions to delight those customers. This is difficult for companies to pull of successfully.

  Occasionally innovation involves meeting completely new needs of customers. For example Toyota started as a loom company and is now known as a car company. Making such a radical change is not often successful.

  Will Toyota be able to add robots to the products it produces successfully? I believe they have a chance. But it won’t be easy.

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• Creating a Deep Commitment to Delighting Customers

  Those organizations that can delight customers today and take the steps today that position the organization to delight customers in the future will prosper and grow. But building and maintaining a management culture that reinforces delighting customers and long term thinking is quite difficult.

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  Successfully delighting customers requires much more than a wish that customers were delighted with our organization. It requires knowing what your customers want and creating system that can reliably delivering that to customers.

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• Technological Innovation and Management

  Organizations need to be designed to be robust and to cope well with the increasingly rapid pace of transformative innovation. This again reinforces the importance of management improvement practices that I have been writing about here (on the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog) for more than 10 years. Organizations that do not delight customers, know the jobs to be done that their customers have, focus on the future (long term thinking), understand how to use data, have well designed processes that allow those at the gemba to know what to do and know how to rapidly adjust based on new realities and possibilities are at great risk.

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• The Importance of Critical Thinking and Challenging Assumptions

  Critical thinking is important to applying management improvement methods effectively. It is important to know when decisions are based on evidence and when decisions are not based on evidence. It can be fine to base some decisions on principles that are not subject to rational criticism. But it is important to understand the thought process that is taken to make each decision. If we are not clear on the basis (evidence or opinion regardless of evidence) we cannot be as effective in targeting our efforts to evaluate the results and continually improve the processes in our organizations.

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  Changing the culture to one that values understanding and learning takes time. That process must be done with an understanding of psychology and the challenges of getting people to evaluate decisions. Creating a culture where it is expected that people think about the evidence and are comfortable explaining and defending the reasoning behind decisions is extremely important.

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