Blog posts on process thinking

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

• Quality is a Journey to Excellence

  I recently uncovered this 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the first section of a the seminar.

  The present system in the US has not provided for any meaningful contribution from the workers themselves to improve the methods of production and the quality of work life. They have no opportunity to exercise their judgement, imagination, creativity or versatility in ways that could contribute to their productivity and sense of dignity. It is no surprise that they undergo frustration and discouragement, feelings certainly not apt to contribute to their efficiency. The solution to our productivity problem is the necessity for management and labor to recognize the intrinsic value of the human being.

   Russell Schrader

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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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• 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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• Better Meetings for Your Organization

  If meetings in your organization are frustrating and not effective then taking steps to improve the situation is likely wise. There are principles I believe will help:   

  • Have a written objective Document decisions and actions to be taken
  • Prepare people in advance (and don’t expect people to come if there isn’t a good reason for them to be there)
  • Talk to those involved in the meetings to learn what is working well, what needs to be improved...

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