process thinking
Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. The Plan Do Study Act improvement cycle is a valuable method to maximize learning and catalyze improvement. See our Deming on Management: PDSA cycle resource page for many more details than are covered here. Here I will just provide four ideas to keep […]
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Guest post by Doug Stilwell, Drake University. There are indeed many reasons change efforts fail. But we can avoid one of those reasons by taking “small jumps;” breaking down important change/improvement efforts into manageable and measurable steps so that the daunting size and complexity of initiatives are not the cause of failure.
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Are you responsible for how a part of your organization prioritizes what must be done? If so, you must find a way to devote time to improvement.
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George Box shared a presentation on Rethinking Statistics for Quality Control at our 2008 Deming Institute Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Kevin Murphy’s presentation at the 14th In2:InThinking Annual Forum Weekend Conference: Application and Lessons of Deming’s Perspective on Leadership: [Vimeo plays the video automatically – which is obviously an extremely bad Ux practice. Even using their code to disable autoplay of the video doesn’t work. So I have removed the embedded video. You may view […]
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Software code review is the practice of reviewing the software code written by colleagues on your software development team. Like many practices the form it takes can vary quite a bit. W. Edwards Deming stated in Out of the Crisis: Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass […]
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In The Improvement Guide, the authors add 3 questions to the PDSA cycle: What are we trying to accomplish? How will we know that a change is an improvement? What change can we make that will result in improvement? As I stated in my previous post on The Improvement Guide I believe anyone using the […]
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Guest post by John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Far too often, companies promote employees into management positions and expect them to fulfill the obligations of their new position without helping prepare them to meet their new responsibilities. People who excelled at doing their non-supervisory job often have little education or experience […]
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“While many in the business world associate the word ‘theory’ with something purely academic or abstract, nothing could be further from the truth. Theories that explain causality are among the most important and practical tools business leaders can have.” – Clayton Christensen
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The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is a wonderful book about how to create systems that work. At the core the Checklist Manifesto is about determining the critical process conditions and creating a system to assure that the those process items are properly handled. In the book Atul Gawande paraphrases Daniel Boorman, veteran pilot who […]
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