Management Books

• The Leader's Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done by Peter R. Scholtes
  Absolutely wonderful book - we give it our highest recommendation.

• Agile Estimating and Planning: by Mike Cohn
  Highlights include: - Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works - How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days—and when to use each - How and when to re-prioritize - How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones

• Short Run SPC: by Donald J. Wheeler
  

• Team Handbook: Third Edition by Peter R. Scholtes, Brian Joiner, Barbara J. Streibel
  Most recent update to the management classic.

• Understanding Statistical Process Control: 2nd edition by Donald J. Wheeler, David S. Chambers
  Describes how to use count data effectively, the right way to assess process capability and the right and wrong ways of computing control chart limits. Provides information on flow charts and pareto charts.

• The New Economics: For Industry, Government, Education by W. Edwards Deming
  Second Edition (reprint). The best of Deming's books for learning about his system for management. Packed with great thoughts but not as easy to read as the best books. This is a great book, but often it is best for managers already committed to finding new ideas.

• Six Sigma Beyond the Factory Floor:: Deployment Strategies for Financial Services, Health Care, and the Rest of the Real Economy by Ronald D. Snee, Roger W. Hoerl
  Recommended. The book is authored by two of the leading practictioners and they do an excellent job of providing their experience and insight on implimenting Six Sigma.

• Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements by Mark Graban
  Healthcare Kaizen focuses on the principles and methods of daily continuous improvement, or Kaizen, for healthcare professionals and organizations. The experiences shared in this book prove that people actually love change when they are fully engaged in the process, get to make improvements that improve patient care and make their day less frustrating, and when they don’t fear being laid off as a result of their improvements. All of the examples in the book were shared by leading healthcare organizations, with over 200 full-color pictures and visual illustrations of Kaizen-based improvements that were initiated by nurses, physicians, housekeepers, senior executives and other staff members at all levels.

• Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler
  An excellent guide to what you must understand about variation to effectively improve your organization.

• Statistics for Experimenters: An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter, J. Stuart Hunter
  See new Statistics for Experimenters - Second Edition
  Or view this classic text used widely in universities and corporations for over 20 years.

• Quality Improvement Through Planned Experimentation: 2nd Edition by Thomas Nolan, Lloyd P. Provost, Ron Moen
  An excellent handbook on how to use experiments to learn about your organization and how to use that knowledge to improve your organization. The book integrates Dr. Deming's ideas and design of experiments thinking. Forward by W. Edwards Deming. 3rd edition is on the way.

• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
  

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance by Gerald J. Langley, Ron Moen, Thomas Nolan, Cliff Norman, Lloyd Provost
  Second edition of this great handbook for process improvement. The best resource for applying the plan-do-study-act cycle to improvement. Highly recommended

• Poka-Yoke: Improving Product Quality by Preventing Defects by Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun
  

• Transforming Health Care Leadership: A Systems Guide to Improve Patient Care, Decrease Costs, and Improve Population Health by Cliff Norman
  "The authors of this book provide the necessary tools for health care leaders to build a learning organization that can make the Triple Aim a reality—better patient care, at lower per-capita cost, while learning to improve population health." — Donald M. Berwick

• Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction by Mark Graban
  

• Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management by Masaaki Imai
  

• Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter, J. Stuart Hunter
  Second Edition of this classic.

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance by Gerald J. Langley, Thomas Nolan, Cliff Norman, Lloyd Provost
  See the second edition of this handbook. Great handbook for process improvement. The best resource for applying the plan-do-study-act cycle to improvement.

• Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability by John Hunter
  The book provides an overview for viewing management as a system. It is largely based on those of Dr. Deming, along with natural outgrowths or extensions of his ideas such as lean manufacturing and agile software development. To achieve great results there must be a continual focus on achieving results today and building enterprise capacity to maximize results over the long term. Managers have many management concepts, pactices and tools available to help them in this quest. The challenge is to create and continually build and improve a management system for the enterprise that leads to success. The book provides a framework for management thinking. With this framework the practices and tools can be applied to build enterprise capacity and improve efficiency and effectiveness.

• Evolutionary Operation: A Statistical Method for Process Improvement by George E. P. Box, Norman R. Draper
  Evolutionary Operation (EVOP), is a simple but powerful statistical tool with wide application in business. What originally motivated the introduction of EVOP, was the idea that the widespread and daily use of simple statistical design and analysis during routine production by process operatives themselves could reap enormous additional rewards.

• The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality by W. Edwards Deming, Joyce Orsini
  The book is filled with articles, papers, lectures, and notes touching on a wide range of topics, but which focus on Deming's overriding message: quality and operations are all about systems, not individual performance; the system has to be designed so that the worker can perform well. Published in cooperation with The W. Edwards Deming Institute, The Essential Deming captures Deming's life's worth of thinking and writing. Dr. Orsini provides expert commentary throughout, delivering a powerful, practical guide to superior management. With The Essential Deming, you have the rationale, insight, and best practices you need to transform your organization.

• An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box by George E. P. Box
  From early childhood to a celebrated career in academia and industry, acclaimed statistician George E.P. Box offers personal insights and a first-hand account of his professional accomplishments in this insightful memoir. It features thoughts from more than a dozen researchers and practitioners on how Box shaped their careers; previously unpublished photos from Box’s personal collection; and Forewords written by two of Box’s closest colleagues and confidants. An Accidental Statistician is a charming, intimate account of a great intellect’s life that will appeal to math and engineering professionals.

• Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System by Art Smalley, Durward K. Sobek
  Winner of a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize. The A3 report has proven to be a key tool In Toyota’s successful move toward organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and improvement, especially within its engineering and R&D organizations. The power of the A3 report, however, derives not from the report itself, but rather from the development of the culture and mindset required for the implementation of the A3 system. In other words, A3 reports are not just an end product but are evidence of a powerful set of dynamics that is referred to as A3 Thinking.

• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
  

• Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones
  "few companies today see consumption as a process -- a series of linked goods and services, all of which must occur seamlessly for the consumer to be satisfied. Buying a home computer, for example, involves researching, purchasing, integrating..."

Management Articles

• A Fun Presentation on a Powerful Software Test Design Approach by Justin Hunter
  "My own consistent experiences and formal studies indicate that pairwise, orthogonal array-based, and combinatorial test design approaches often lead to a doubling of tester productivity (as measured in defects found per tester hour) as compared to the far more prevalent practice in the software testing industry of selecting and documenting test cases by hand."

• Summing it all up by Hemal Kuntawala
  "So testers, to summarise, if you have a 'QA' column on your task wall, you’re doing it wrong. Go pair with a developer, now. Don’t just wait to bat back a list of bugs to them, go help them avoid having to work on the same thing twice. ... Ask which scenarios are important and forget about the ridiculous edge cases for now. Now build it and get real feedback."

• Robust Experimental Strategies for Improving Upstream Productivity by Ronald D. Snee
  The solution to this problem is to use Lean principles to streamline the processes and procedures used to do the experimental work. Eliminating complexity and wasted time and effort results in experimentation being speeded up and scientists having more time to do creative work.

• Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient by John Allspaw
  "for complex systems: there is no root cause. ... Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes. ... In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."

• The Gemba Walk by Norman Bodek
  "the plant manager got up from behind his desk. He asked me to join him on his daily walk; in fact he told me that he walked the plant twice a day every day and that it was the most valuable part of his day... The plant manager asked those questions and you could see the excitement on the face of the supervisor as he was answering the questions. I learned that there’s enormous power in the leader asking questions and then just listening – yes; this is the key to ask the question and then to just listen carefully, not judgmentally."

• Keys to the Effective Use of the PDSA Improvement Cycle by John Hunter
  "The PDSA cycle is a learning cycle based on experiments. When using the PDSA cycle prediction of the results are important... The plan stage may well take 80% (or even more) of the effort on the first turn of the PDSA cycle in a new series. The Do stage may well take 80% of of the time - it usually doesn't take much effort (to just collect a bit of extra data) but it may take time for that data to be ready to collect."

• Teaching Engineers Experimental Design with a Paper Helicopter by George E. P. Box
  "How a paper 'helicopter' made in a minute or so from 8 1/2' x 11' sheet of paper can be used to teach principles of experimental design including - conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs, and the management of experimentation."

• Standardized Work is a Goal To Work Toward, Not a Tool to Implement by Jeffrey Liker
  Standardized work is foundational to the Toyota Production System, yet remains one of the most misunderstood principles to outsiders. It is crucial to understand the true purpose of this foundational practice. Standardized work in the context of the Toyota Way refers to the most efficient and effective combination of people, material, and equipment to perform the work that is presently possible. “Presently possible” means it is today’s best-known way, which can be improved.

• If Jon Stewart Can Do It, so Can You by Daniel Markovitz
  Jon Stewart "I’m a real believer in that creativity comes from limits, not freedom. Freedom, I think you don’t know what to do with yourself. But when you have a structure, then you can improvise off it." Dan "If something as evanescent as comic inspiration can be turned into a process, there’s no excuse for you to not create a process for your own work."

• Evolution of the PDSA Cycle by Ron Moen, Cliff Norman
  "Deming has always given credit to Shewhart for the idea of the cycle, but Deming has fostered the expansion of the idea to all areas for learning and improvement."

• Why Lean Programs Fail by Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "a large survey conducted by Industry Week in 2007 found that only 2 percent of companies achieved their anticipated results... When we look at lean in this way it is not only a set of techniques for eliminating waste, but a process by which managers as leaders develop people so that desired results can be achieved, again and again. That means coaching people in practicing an improvement kata every day."

• Analytical studies: a framework for quality improvement design and analysis by Lloyd Provost
  "An enumerative study is one in which action will be taken on the universe that was studied. An analytical study is one in which action will be taken on a cause system to improve the future performance of the system of interest. The aim of an enumerative study is estimation, while an analytical study focuses on prediction. Because of the temporal nature of improvement, the theory and methods for analytical studies are a critical component of the science of improvement."

• The Promise of Lean in Health Care by John Toussaint
  "Health care cases reveal that Lean is as applicable in complex knowledge work as it is in assembly-line manufacturing. When well executed, Lean transforms how an organization works and creates an insatiable quest for improvement. In this article, we define Lean and present 6 principles that constitute the essential dynamic of Lean management: attitude of continuous improvement, value creation, unity of purpose, respect for front-line workers, visual tracking, and flexible regimentation. ... Lean is a journey, not a destination. Unlike specific programs, Lean has no finish line. Creating a culture of Lean is to create an insa- tiable appetite for improvement; there is no turning back."

• A Lean Walk Through History by Jim Womack
  "Once you are sensitized to the depth of lean history, along with its many advances and setbacks, it's easy to begin filling in some of the other milestones: By 1765, French general Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval had grasped the significance of standardized designs and interchangeable parts to facilitate battlefield repairs. (Actually doing this cost-effectively in practice was another matter and required another 125 years.)"

• Variation, So Meaningful Yet So Misunderstood by Lynda Finn
  "assuming an issue is the result of a special cause will send you on a hunt for the special cause. Walter Shewhart and Deming proved that special cause thinking will lead you astray most of the time. So, if in your company there is often a search for whom or what is to blame before questioning whether the problem is built into the current processes and systems, then you too are likely wasting time and misidentifying causes."

• The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May
  "Everywhere, there’s too much of the wrong stuff, and not enough of the right. The noise is deafening, the signal weak. Everything is too complicated and time-sucking. Welcome to the age of excess everything. Success in this new age looks different, and demands a new and singular skill: Subtraction. Subtraction is defined simply as the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly—and the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place."

• So What's System[s] Thinking by Ian Bradbury
  Brief article introducing two key ideas in systems thinking: interdependence and the separation of cause and effect in space and time.

• Metrics and Software Development by John Hunter
  "I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system 'big picture') the most useful strategy. The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone. But those process measures can be selected to measure key processes within the system..."

• Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed by John Hunter
  "The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A

• William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box
  This is the text of a talk given at the Speakers' Dinner at the Sixth Annual William G. Hunter Conference on Quality in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 2, 1993. In it, George Box recalls Bill Hunter's pivotal role in the birth of the quality movement in the c

• An Introduction to Deming's Management Ideas by Peter R. Scholtes
  An Introduction to Deming's Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes - webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008.

• The Principles of the Kanban Method by David Anderson
  Use the 5 Core Properties." 1. Visualize the workflow 2. Limit WIP 3. Manage Flow 4. Make Process Policies Explicit 5. Improve Collaboratively (using models & the scientific method)"

• Actionable Metrics by John Hunter
  "Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can't think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking."

• In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity
  Toyota has “revolutionized the way we serve our community,” said Margarette Purvis, the chief executive and president of the Food Bank. But Toyota’s initial offer to the charity in 2011 was met with apprehension. “They make cars; I run a kitchen,” said Daryl Foriest, director of distribution at the Food Bank’s pantry and soup kitchen in Harlem. “This won’t work.” When Toyota insisted it would, Mr. Foriest presented the company with a challenge. “The line of people waiting to eat is too long,” Mr. Foriest said. “Make the line shorter.”

• William Considine embraces Lean Six Sigma to improve Akron Children’s Hospital
  "before it brought out the hammers, it asked members of the department and of the hospital's Lean Six Sigma team to review the problem. Turns out, a simple redesign of the processes and space solved the problem. No space added, no employees added, and $3.5 million saved. ... f your child needed an MRI two years ago, the waiting list at Akron Children’s was about 25 to 28 days. Through discussion with department employees and dissection of the workload, the hospital was able to add 35 MRI tests a week, dropping the wait time to three days or less."

• Improving Problem Solving by Ian Bradbury
  A good overview of common problem solving practices. The report also includes advice on how to improve results in you organization though problem solving and system improvement.

• Do Interactions Matter? by George E. P. Box
  "It has recently been argued that in an industrial setting the detection and elucidation of interactions between variables is unimportant. In this report the contrary view is advanced and is illustrated with examples."

• Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail by Esther Derby
  "Choosing Actions the Team Doesn’t Have Energy For... They may have tried before and failed, the task may be too difficult or time-consuming given the other work they have to do, or the work may be plain unpleasant. In any case, when the team doesn’t have energy to work on an improvement, chances are pretty good it won’t get done. Go with the task the team has the energy to complete."

• Overcoming the Improvement Paradox by Elizabeth Keating, Rogelio Oliva, Nelson Repenning, Scott Rockart, John Sterman
  "Our findings suggest that the inability to manage an improvement program as a dynamic process is the main determinant of program failure."

• What Can You Find Out From 12 Experimental Runs? by George E. P. Box, Soren Bisgaard
  Examines the possibilities of factorially designed experiments using many variables at once.

• You say tomato, I say tomato by Tom Southworth
  "To me, Lean has at its core four very simple ideals. It is: safer, easier better, economical"

• Why the retrospective is not a lessons learned meeting
  "Just real, useful, insightful and timely agreements about what we're doing NOW to be even better than we were last time. That's the retrospective."

• Scientific Method and Continual Improvement by David Kerridge, Sarah Kerridge
  An excellent artilce on how the scientific method should be applied to improve the management of human systems.

• Clearing Up Myths About the Deming Cycle by Ron Moen, Cliff Norman
  "This new approach provides a basic framework for developing, testing and implementing changes to the way things are done that will lead to improvement."

• How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted by John Hunter
  "Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."

• A Fresh Look at Flow Charting by Tony Burns
  "The computer enables each symbol to be neatly aligned and connecting lines drawn clearly and simply...However, in using computer based flow charts, there may often be more negatives than benefits, as will be seen."

• Respect for People by Jim Womack
  "the manager isn’t a morale booster, always saying, 'Great job!' Instead the manager challenges the employees every step of the way, asking for more thought, more facts, and more discussion, when the employees just want to implement their favored solution. Over time I've come to realize that this problem solving process is actually the highest form of respect."

• A Structured Approach to Rapid Process Development and Control by Raymond Augustin
  Illustrates the use various quality tools including a cause and effect diagram and QFD (house of quality). "By adhering to the road map described here, process development teams will be able to focus their energy and efforts on doing it right the first time, thereby delivering fully developed and optimized processes more quickly."

• Statistics and Reality by David Kerridge, Sarah Kerridge
  "W. Edwards Deming distinguished between two types of statistical study, which he called 'Enumerative' and 'Analytic'. This sounds theoretical, and it is: but it is also a very practical."

• On Probability As a Basis For Action by W. Edwards Deming
  "The aim here is to try to contribute something to the improvement of statistical practice. The basic supposition here is that any statistical investigation is carried out for purposes of action. New knowledge modifies existing knowledge. " Deming distinguishes between enumerative studies and analytic studies. An enumerative study has for its aim an estimate of the number of units of a frame that belong to a specified class. An analytic study has for its aim a basis for action on the cause-system or the process, in order to improve product of the future.

• Special Cause Signal Isn’t Proof A Special Cause Exists by John Hunter
  The control chart is a good way to keep us focused on common cause thinking for improvement. It is also very useful in flagging when it is time to immediately start using special cause thinking (since timing is key to effective special cause thinking)...

• Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t? by Atul Gawande
  "In our era of electronic communications, we’ve come to expect that important innovations will spread quickly. Plenty do: think of in-vitro fertilization, genomics, and communications technologies themselves. But there’s an equally long list of vital innovations that have failed to catch on. The puzzle is why."

• Starbucks, Queueing Theory, Constraints, and Lean by Peter Abilla
  "If establishing a consistent order fulfillment drumbeat is important, Starbucks needs to do the following: 1) Reduce, immediately, the number of product combinations. 2) Model the properties of each of those combinations in both time, material, information, steps, and flow. But, focus on the 80/20 – the most ordered combinations first..."

• Process Improvement Notebook
  Manual to assist quality improvement teams to highlight important information related to process improvement. Each section of the Process Improvement Notebook contains forms and instructions for how to complete the forms.

• Operational Excellence: From Fragmented Vocation to Principle-Driven Profession by Steven Spear
  "Be it lean, six sigma, lean six sigma, business process excellence, reengineering, or TPS, the common objective is creating substantial and sustainable competitive advantage by managing the internal operations of organizations—across the spectrum of development, design, and delivery—to create exceptional differentials in performance across the dimensions of quality, cost, reliability, responsiveness, security, and agility."

• How Do We Know What We Know? - Deming's SoPK Part IV by John Hunter
  "If we can break from such beliefs that are not useful in modern organizations, we can improve our decisions. Having a Deming-based theory of knowledge will help us break from those beliefs and it will help us be more thoughtful as we learn to question other management beliefs we hold (many of which simply are not useful - or cause harm). Understanding the theory of knowledge within the context of the Deming's System for Managing helps us more effectively and consistently learn and improve the processes and systems we work with. "

• Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map by Davis Balestracci
  "The current design of experiments (DOE) renaissance seems to favor factorial designs and/or orthogonal arrays as a panacea. In my 25 years as a statistician, my clients have always found much more value in obtaining a process "road map" by generating the inherent response surface in a situation."

• How An Aeron Chair Gets Built Every 17 Seconds
  "At Herman Miller, they average 1,200 'plan-do-check acts'--that is, little proposed changes to the assembly process--ever year. ... A decade ago, an Aeron took more than 600 seconds in total to build. Today, it’s about 340. Meanwhile, safety metrics have improved by a factor of 6. Quality metrics have improved by a factor of 10. A single Aeron takes one fifth of the labor to make that it once did. The actual factory itself is 10 times smaller. Today, Herman Miller is doing far more with the same labor force that was once producing a sum total of five different office chairs. Today, they produce 17, using roughly the same number of people. And all the while, lead times have shrunk from two months to as little as 10 days." "

• How to Get Lucky by George E. P. Box
  "Some principles for success in quality improvement projects discuss, in particular, how to encourage die discovery of useful phenomena not initially being sought. A graphical version of the analysis of variance which can help show up the unexpected is illustrated with two examples."

• How to Apply Japanese Company-Wide Quality Control in Other Countries by Kaoru Ishikawa
  Kaoru Ishikawa highlights how to improve performance based on 20 years of experience visiting countries all over the world to give consult on quality control implementation.

• Statistics as a Catalyst to Learning by Scientific Method by George E. P. Box
  Explores the implications raised when Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is considered, as was originally intended as a statistical technique for the catalysis of iterative learning.

• My First Trip to Japan by Peter R. Scholtes
  Report on trip to Japan to learn about how Japanese management focused on quality and productivity improvement to meet and exceed customers needs and expectations.

• Statistics for Discovery by George E. P. Box
  This report explores why investigators in engineering and the physical sciences rarely use statistics. It is argued that statistics has been overly influenced by mathematical methods rather than the scientific method and consequently the subject has been greatly skewed towards testing rather than discovery.

• Transformation and Redesign at the White House Communications Agency by March Laree Jacques
  Originally published by the American Society for Quality in the Quality Management Journal, Volume 6, Issue 3, 1999.

• Teaching Quality Improvement by Quality Improvement in Teaching by Ian Hau
  This paper describes how students and the instructor worked as a team to improve the quality of teaching in a class. The defect rate dropped from 78% to 22% for computer instruction, 56% to 8% for blackboard presentation and 82% to 20% for overhead presentation.

• The Next 25 Years in Statistics by William Hill, William G. Hunter
  (with contributions by Joseph W. Duncan, A. Blanton Godfrey, Brian L. Joiner, Gary C. McDonald, Charles G. Pfeifer, Donald W. Marquardt, and Ronald D. Snee). A transformation of the American style of management has already begun; in order for it to succee

• Lean Leadership Kaizen is Management by Mark Rosenthal
  "First they tried copying the benchmarked system on a small-scale test to deepen their understanding of what they had studied. Trying it on their parts surfaced differences that weren’t obvious at first, and they learned copying definitely wouldn’t work. Key: The reason they tried to copy was to learn more about it. This was a small-scale concept test, not an attempt at wholesale implementation... So, while an individual improvement task might take longer as people learn, in the end there is a multiplier effect as more and more people get better and better at making improvements. Sadly, it is really impossible to assign an ROI to that, so traditional management doesn’t allow for it..."

• Total Quality Leadership vs. Management by Results by Brian Joiner, Peter R. Scholtes
  Excellent article for those interested in improving management. It begins with a very short early 90's view on the increasing Asian economic clout. Those who are not interested in management improvement would likely be tempted to ignore the important...

• Design of Experiments in Healthcare Delivery
  "Typically, this involves iterative testing of different factors, settings and configurations, and using the results of successive tests to further refine the product or process. When properly done, a DOE approach produces more precise results while using many fewer experimental runs than other methods (e.g., one factor at a time, or trial and error)"

• Combinatorial Software Testing by Rick Kuhn, Raghu Kacker, Yu Lei, Justin Hunter
  While the most basic form of combinatorial testing, pairwise, is well established, and adoption by software testing practitioners continues to increase, industry usage of these methods remains patchy at best. However, the additional training required is

• The Art of Discovery by George E. P. Box, John Hunter
  Quotes by George Box in the video: “The scientific method is how we increase the rate at which we find things out.” “I think the quality revolution is nothing more, or less, than the dramatic expansion of the of scientific problem solving using informed observation and directed experimentation to find out more about the process, the product and the customer.” “Tapping into resources: Every operating system generates information that can be used to improve it. Everyone has creativity. Designed experiments can greatly increase the efficiency of experimentation."

• Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin by William G. Hunter, Jan O'neill, Carol Wallen
  "The new quality improvement ideas can help public officials combat the effects of decreasing budgets just as they help private businesses increase productivity." Published in Quality Progress, July 1987.

• You are Solving the Wrong Problem
  "The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. ... When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again."

• What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs? by George E. P. Box
  Includes two articles on options for designed experiments. Design of Experiments is a tools used heavily in Six Sigma programs.

• Going Lean in Health Care by Jim Womack
  "Lean principles hold the promise of reducing or eliminating wasted time, money, and energy in health care, creating a system that is efficient, effective, and truly responsive to the needs of patients ? the 'customers' at the heart of it all."

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is a way of visualizing invisible knowledge work activities such as software development, and limiting the quantity of work in progress. Limiting work-in-progress has several benefits: by avoiding over-burdening, quality is often significantly higher, while workers are happier and better motivated; delivery times are usually significantly shorter and far more predictable; priorities are often clear and prioritization decisions are simplified... Deming’s work is core to everything we do. I think his book, The New Economics, is a seminal work in management thinking... If I could have coffee with just one of these process and management science pioneers it would be Deming."

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is still in the very early stages of adoption. It is true that most people in the software industry have never heard of it. However, there are many hundreds of companies on 5 continents already doing it. Some have very large, successful and well documented implementations. Firms such as the BBC in London, Globo and Petrobras in Brazil, Amdocs in Israel, Vanguard is a well known American adopter."

• 3 Reasons Why Layoffs Don't Benefit Hospitals in the Long Run
  "ThedaCare retrains its employees in a similar fashion to Scripps in that it guarantees to help employees find new employment primarily within the health system or elsewhere, and its emphasis on Lean principles has led to very successful retraining efforts. 'The number of people we've redeployed or retrained has varied from as few as 25 to up to 75 per year,' Dr. Gruner says. 'We would like that to be a higher number, not lower, because a higher number means we're doing a better job of identifying waste.'"

• Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management
  The aim of this guidebook is to help small businesses make the transition to a quality culture. While the focus of the guidebook is small businesses the information is helpful to anyone transforming and continually improving their organization.

• Rounding for Outcomes
  "Rounding for Outcomes is the consistent practice of asking specific questions of key stakeholders—leaders, employees, physicians and patients—to obtain actionable information... The focus of questions during rounding are to: > Build relationships... > Harvest "wins" to learn what is going well... > Identify process improvement areas..."

• Lean Thinking and Management by John Hunter
  "The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go 'up' the organization chart."

• Presenter and participants actually test software by Justin Hunter
  by Matt Heusser "The first session of the conference was Justin Hunter’s “Let’s Test Together,” which promised to not only introduce a new test design method, but to change the way we (the audience) think about software testing. ... It was a neat session and his passion came through"

• Resist your machine thinking! by Jeffrey Liker
  "To maintain consistent output, one must continually adjust the system to changing environmental conditions. This is called dynamic homeostasis in systems thinking, or running to stay in place. ... Maintenance comes from having clearly defined standards, observing carefully for deviations from those standards, and then developing and implementing countermeasures to eliminate the deviations."

• The Scientific Context of Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box, Soren Bisgaard
  Scientific method is a key ingredient in the new philosophy of quality and productivity improvement. This paper provides an overview. A discussion of new ideas of how to design quality into products and processes is provided and Taguchi's work is evaluated.

• Circling Back: Clearing up myths about the Deming cycle and Seeing How it Keeps Evolving by Ron Moen, Cliff Norman
  

• Kanban for Skeptics by Nick Oostvogels
  "WIP limits will reveal bottlenecks quickly and create momentum to help others and start the continuous improvement cycle. The power of continuous improvement in Kanban will help you improve flow"

• A Management, Leadership, and Board Road Map to Transforming Care for Patients by John Toussaint
  "This article offers an alternative approach: management by process—an operating system that engages frontline staff in decisions and imposes standards and processes on the act of managing. Organizations that have adopted management by process have seen quality improve and costs decrease because the people closest to the work are expected to identify problems and solve them. Also detailed are the leadership behaviors required for an organization to successfully implement the management-by-process operating system and the board of trustees’ role in supporting the transformation."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Lean Enterprise Institute by Jim Womack
  "We carefully develop hypotheses about lean thinking and experiment to see which approaches work best in the real world. We then write up and teach what we discover, providing new methods for organizational transformation. We strive to answer the simple question of every manager, "What can I do on Monday morning to make a difference in my organization?" And, by creating a strong Lean Community through our website and public events we try to give managers the courage to become lean change agents."

• Management and Leadership Quotes by John Hunter
  Quotes on management, business, leadership and many related topics: innovation, problems solving, change, statistics, planning, motivation, etc..

• Lean Edge by Michael Ballé, H. Thomas Johnson, Daniel T. Jones, Art Smalley, Steven Spear, Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "Lean management is a method to dramatically improve business performance by teaching people how to improve their own processes. The two main dimensions of lean management are continuous process improvement (going and seeing problems at the source, challenging operations and improving step by step) and respect for people (developing and engaging employees by developing teamwork, problem solving and respect for customers, employees and all other partners). ... The aim of the discussion [on the site] is to share different points of view and to collectively build a vision of lean management."

• Inspector Guilfoyle
  "I am a serving Police Inspector and systems thinker, passionate about doing the right thing in policing. I write, lecture and advise on the benefits of incorporating systems thinking principles into policing, having studied the works of W. Edwards Deming and associated authors and successfully applied their theories to operational policing."

• The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog by John Hunter
  

• W. Edwards Deming Institute by W. Edwards Deming
  Founded by W. Edwards Deming the institute carries forward his philosophy. The site includes information on the institutes annual conferences and offers newsletters online.

• Institute for Healthcare Improvement
  IHI works to accelerate improvement by building the will for change, cultivating promising concepts for improving patient care, and helping health care systems put those ideas into action. White papers available online on topics such as: Planning for Scale: Going Lean in Health Care, A Guide for Designing Large-Scale Improvement Initiatives, A Framework for Spread: From Local Improvements to System-Wide Change, and Seven Leadership Leverage Points for Organization-Level Improvement in Health Care.

• Lean Post
  Articles from the Lean Enterprise Institute including authors: Michael Ballé, Jim Womack and John Shook and many guest authors.

• Steven Spear by Steven Spear
  Five-time winner of the Shingo Prize for research excellence and a senior lecturer at MIT and former assistant professor at Harvard. A senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, he is the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and trade publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.

• John Grout's Mistake-Proofing Center
  Many examples of mistake-proofing.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• Science of Improvement by Cliff Norman
  

• Peter Scholtes by Peter R. Scholtes
  Web site of Peter Scholtes, author of The Leader's Handbook (an excellent book) and The Team Handbook. The site offers several excellent management articles. He taught with Deming. Peter was a good friend and his management ideas are well worth studying.

• Shmula by Peter Abilla
  "This blog is my take on technology, business, operations, The Toyota Production System / Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Queueing Theory, operations research, building software, the customer experience (especially ethnography and design thinking and word-of-mouth marketing)"

• How to implement Lean Thinking in a Business by Tracey Richardson
  Blog by a trainer for Toyota and consultant.

• Lean Simulations
  "The focus of this site is Lean training material, ready-to-use and free. I am searching the web for lean simulations, lean games, presentations, and real world examples. Please feel free to email me your material and I will link to it or post it."

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Squawk Point
  "The Squawk Point is dedicated to service improvement. It is full of ideas, news and practical advice for people who run service operations and want to improve their performance."

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Not Running a Hospital by Paul Levy
  Author is a former hospital CEO and an "advocate for patient-driven care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement."

• Lean Six Sigma for Law Enforcement
  Blog by Sergeant Billy Wilkerson (with the Jacksonville, Florida Shefiff's Office).

• Associates in Process Improvement
  Consulting firm with Provost, Langley, Norman, Moen and Nolan. Authors of the excellent: Improvement Guide. Several very good articles on variation available on the site.

• Performance Improvement
  Blog by Glenn Whitfield focused on business management, lean, strategy, and related topics.

• Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter by John Hunter, William G. Hunter
  George Box, Stuart Hunter and Bill wrote what has become a classic text for experimenters in scientific and business circles, Statistics for Experimenters. Bill also was a leader in the emergence of the management improvement movement. George Box and Bill co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bill Hunter was also the founding chair of the ASQ statistics division.

• Lean Urbanism
  "The Project for Lean Urbanism will restore common sense to the processes of development, building, starting small businesses, community engagement, and acquiring the necessary skills. The Project will devise tools so that community-building takes less time, reduces the resources required for compliance, and frustrates fewer well-intentioned entrepreneurs, by providing ways to work around onerous financial, bureaucratic, and regulatory processes."

• Be More Careful by Mark Graban
  A Collection of workplace signs and posters that don't get to the root cause.

• PQ Systems
  Software and services provider related to SPC tools. The site includes a blog.

• Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter
  Founded in 1985 by George E.P. Box and the William Hunter at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The technical report series is one of the best online management resources with reports authors including: George Box, W. Edwards Deming, Peter Scholtes, Kaoru Ishikawa, William Hunter, Gipsie Ranney and Brian Joiner. Sadly the center has abandoned the ideas of George Box and Bill Hunter. It once was a very important center for thought about management improvement. The legacy left by Box and Hunter has been lost. I find this very sad and a huge insult to the memories of those great men. Bill Hunter was my father and built the Center after he was diagnosed with fatal cancer because it was a useful way to provide benefit to the world. Seeing that cause abandoned I find insulting and extremely unfortunate for all those that no longer have the possibility of benefiting from the vision of Box and Hunter through the center. Thankfully many people that learned from them have continued to build upon their work. And their books, writing and other material continue to inspire those interested in management improvement.