Management Articles

• 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. "

• Are We "Doing Lean" All Wrong?
  "At this point in a story, everyone wants 'The Big Aha!.' 'Just tell me what things I need to do like Danaher / Wiremold / that small company in Ohio… so I can copy them and get the same results!' Of course that never works or else we’d only have one book about Toyota, but I digress. The Aha for this company was not something they did, but rather something they stopped doing. They stopped striving to “do Lean” by following everyone else’s models of what a Lean company should look like. Instead, they inadvertently ran a series of experiments on how to take good business practices and apply them in ways that meshed with their current culture. This last point is hugely important and addresses a major reason for why Lean fails. People and the organizations they create change incrementally. If we ask too much, too soon, or even ask them too think too deeply, they will not change because the human brain doesn’t know how to make the mental leap."

• 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."

• 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..."

• 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

• 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."

• 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.

• If The Only Tool You Have is a Hammer
  "Eventually my journey in software and testing as extended into areas like Agile and particularly Lean. This gave even sharper context to the concept that there is no 'right way' to do something, only slightly better or worse ways and more often than not the distinction is unclear. Nowadays it causes me almost physical pain when someone refers to 'Best Practice' and I often have to restrain myself from physical violence when someone says “We tried that once, and it didn’t work.'"

Management Web Sites and Resources

• 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.