Tag: continual improvement
Management Books
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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.
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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.
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Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results
by
Mike Rother
"Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress—and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture."
—Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way
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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.
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Gemba Walks:
by
Jim Womack
This book complies Womack's essays on the practice of lean and adds some additional context to the essays.
Management Articles
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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..."
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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.
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The Promise of Lean in Health Care
by
John Toussaint
and Leonard L. Berry, PhD. "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. Health care case studies illustrate each principle. The goal of this article is to provide a template for health care leaders to use in considering the implementation of the Lean management system or in assessing the current state of implementation in their organizations."
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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."
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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.
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Maintenance comes from having clearly defined standards, observing
carefully for deviations from those standards, and then developing
and implementing countermeasures to eliminate the deviations."
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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"
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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."
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Jeff Bezos's mission: Compelling small publishers to think big
by
Jeff Bezos
"I would hope people would say that Amazon is earth's most customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers. Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work forward from their skills. They say this is what we're good at, and this is what we'll do. It's a very different approach from saying here is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need.
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the key is that the company has to experiment, and what you want to try and do is reduce the cost of experimentation so you can do as many experiments per unit time as possible
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and they're not experiments if you know they're going to work."
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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..."
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Approaching a Minimum Viable Product
"The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you'll need enough money to answer them all."
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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Are lean principles universal?
by
Michael Ballé
"There is only one golden rule: we make people before we make parts. This requires a spirit of challenge, open mind and teamwork, as Pascal Dennis phrased it in his great lean novel Andy and Me. Every industry is different, but all human beings share the same capabilities and potentials – that is universal. As one Sensei once told me, the biggest room is the room for improvement."
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Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars
"We have adapted our personalization algorithms to this new scenario in such a way that now 75% of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation. We reached this point by continuously optimizing the member experience and have measured significant gains in member satisfaction whenever we improved the personalization
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Our business objective is to maximize member satisfaction and month-to-month subscription retention, which correlates well with maximizing consumption of video content. We therefore optimize our algorithms to give the highest scores to titles that a member is most likely to play and enjoy."
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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..."
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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..."
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Dr. Demings 1950 Lecture to Japanese Top Management
"In 1950, Dr. Deming gave a lecture to 80% of the top management people in Japan. What follows is a English translation of the original Japanese transcript. John Dowd made this happen a few years back and has agreed to share it with the Deming Community."
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Eight guidelines for closing the knowing-doing gap
by
Jason Yip
"Why before How: philosophy is important. Focus on Why (philosophy, general guidance) before How (detailed practices, behaviours, techniques)
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Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts. Ready, fire, aim. Act even if you haven't had the time to fully plan the action..."
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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. "
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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.
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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."
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What Lean Really is: The evolution of Toyota's practices
by
Daniel T. Jones
"the distinguishing feature of Ohno's approach was to challenge and teach front line and support staff how to design their own work, using the Training Within Industry system pioneered during WWII in the USA (4). This enabled the front line to establish a standard way of doing their work as a base line for improvement, which in turn enabled them to see and respond to any deviations from this standard immediately. In analyzing the root causes of the many issues that interrupted their work he also taught them how to use the scientific approach to solving problems, using Deming's PDCA method.
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Lean shares the same scientific approach to the analysis of work with many improvement methodologies, like BPR, Six Sigma and TQM. But it differs from them in how it is used. Rather than experts using scientific methods to design better systems, lean builds superior performance by developing the problem solving capabilities of the front line, supported by a hands-on management system."
Management Web Sites and Resources
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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).
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The aim of the discussion [on the site] is to share different points of view and to collectively build a vision of lean management."
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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, ...
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Gemba Walkabout
by
Mike Stoecklein
“Gemba walk” (lean thinking term) to go to the actual place where value is added + “walkabout” (Australian aborigine) a short period of wandering bush life engaged as an occasional interruption of regular work.
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Langford for Learning
by
David P. Langford
Quality learning achieved through continual improvement of systems which aim to produce the optimum state of personal, social, physical, and intellectual development within each individual. It is a commitment to excellence by each individual and is achieved through teamwork and a process of continual improvement and/or redesign.
The site includes worthwhile articles.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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PQ Systems
Software and services provider related to SPC tools. The site includes a blog.
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Toyota Production System
Site on Toyota.com. "The Toyota Production System (TPS) was established based on two concepts: The first is called 'jidoka'(which can be loosely translated as 'automation with a human touch') which means that when a problem occurs, the equipment stops immediately, preventing defective products from being produced; The second is the concept of 'Just-in-Time,' in which each process produces only what is needed by the next process in a continuous flow."
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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.
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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.