Blog posts on productivity

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

• Take Advantage of the Strengths Each Person Brings to Work

  Managers should be setting up the organization to take maximum advantage of the strengths of the people in the organization while minimizing the impact of weaknesses.

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• Building a System to Reduce Interruptions for Software Developers

  I feel strongly about the damage done by interruption to maker's focus. My appreciation for this damage to system performance was greatly enhanced as I became a software developer.
  
  In my work prior to software development I could see that interruptions were not ideal but they were not so damaging to my work and they do also have value. But work that requires extra focus, and software development sure did for me, the damage increasing greatly.

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• Businesses Need to Capture Potential Information and Use the Creativity of Employees

  My father wrote an article a long time ago on how to use ~"two resources, largely untapped in American organizations: potential information and employee creativity."
  
  I think it provides worthwhile ideas.

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• Acting Without Theory Often Results in Wasted Effort

  If you don’t understand why you take action you will find yourself wasting effort. You must have a theory that you can test in order to test what is working, what changes actually lead to improvement and to learn. If this bird wants to find food it will discover this method isn’t effective.

  I wrote about a similar example before: Experience Teaches Nothing Without Theory.

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• US Fish and Wildlife Service Plans to Use Drones to Drop Vaccine Treats to Save Ferrets

  To date, SPV has been applied by hand with people walking pre-defined transects and uniformly dropping single SPV baits every 9-10 meters to achieve a deposition rate of 50 SPV doses per acre. Depending on vegetation and terrain, a single person walking can treat 3-6 acres per hour. All terrain vehicles (ATVs) have been considered but have various problems.

  If the equipment and expertise can be developed as proposed here, a single UAS operator could treat more than 60 acres per hour.

  If the equipment can be developed to deposit 3 SPV doses simultaneously every second, as they envision is possible, some 200 acres per hour could be treated by a single operator.

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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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• Better Meetings for Your Organization

  This is similar to Deming’s ideas on management, I don’t believe their is a recipe to follow. There are principles that are universal. But what specific form they take depends greatly on the specific circumstances and systems in place.

  Here 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 and if the meetings are worth the effort (should there be fewer meetings or should less time be taken with them)

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• Improving the System to Reduce Costs Isn’t The Same as Cost Cutting

  Cutting costs by fiat via executive orders reduces the capability of the organization. Those costs are often born by customers. In the short term reducing costs in such a manner improves the financial statements. In the long run those cost reductions harm the companies ability to innovate, improve and delight customers.

  If instead we create a continual improvement capability and culture in the organization we will make improvements that in turn reduce costs (the Deming chain reaction).

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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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• Testing Smarter with Matt Heusser

  Hexawise: You have written about the benefits of lean thinking in software testing. What advantages do organizations gain when they adopt a lean thinking view of software testing?

  Matt: You know that thing that happens, where you can't do your job because you filed a ticket and it will take the DBA's a week to add a column to a table, so you can't do your job, for a week?

  Or whatever else it is? Right now I've got a contractor billing on my team with no laptop. He'll have it nine days after he started ... if we're lucky.

  Typically, when a company goes to lean thinking, that kind of stuff stops happening.

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• Eliminating Complexity from Work

  as much as half of the activities of about sixty people had been to set up and take down jobs, expedite, move material, count material, and do other tasks that were unnecessary in the new process.

  Tim Fuller's article discusses how much inneficiency was removed from the process by adopting single piece flow in 1985.  How long did it take for management practice to understand this?  Certainly this understanding wasn't widespred in 2005.  I am not even sure it if it is widely understood and systems have been designed or redesigned with this knowledge in 2017.

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• Innovation and Research and Development

  Innovation can be related to productivity improvement or it can be completely unrelated. A company could innovate with an ideas like the remote control for televisions (or microlending or air bags). That innovation may not contribute in any way to manufacturing televisions more productively.
  
  Other innovation may be related to improving the productivity alone and add no additional functionality to the customer. Many innovations will provide a combination of both benefits. Both innovation and productivity improvement are important.

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• People: Team Members or Costs

  Both Toyota and GM seek to use technology to improve but Toyota sees the technology as useful to help people to be more efficient, eliminate menial repetitive tasks, eliminate tasks that cause injury… and it seems to me GM saw technology as a way to eliminate people. The action showed a company that viewed people as a cost to be eliminated. GM did not act as though people were their “most important assets” as we so often hear, but see so little evidence of in the action of companies.

  
  Toyota does try to reduce overall costs (including labor costs) by continually improving and making cars more and more efficiently (so they can produce cars using fewer hours of labor in the future than they need today). Trying to become more efficient by engaging everyone in the effort is a part of the system of management at Toyota. The current Toyota employees are an important part of the system and are not viewed as a cost to eliminate. 

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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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