process thinking
By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. our system of make-and-inspect, which if applied to making toast would be expressed: “You burn, I’ll scrape.” Joe Sensennbrer quoting Dr. Deming in his article, Quality Comes to City Hall This wonderful quote highlights Dr. Deming’s ability to use humor and create a simple […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Ron Moen and Clifford Norman wrote a very interesting article on the history of the PDSA cycle: Clearing up myths about the Deming cycle and seeing how it keeps evolving. It is not enough to determine that a change resulted in improvement during a […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. Point 4 in W. Edwards Deming’s 14 points for management Even […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). A company could put a top man at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together. W. Edwards Deming in his last interview: ‘Management Today Does Not Know What Its Job […]
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This post in an excerpt from The Quality Leadership Workbook for Police by Chief David Couper and Captain Sabine Lobitz. While the intense focus on quality movement in the 1980s did not become the dominant way to run an organization like many of us thought it would, it still became one of society’s major influences. […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. W. Edwards Deming included this example of businesses cooperating with competitors in The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education: My automobile, sitting in front of my house, would not start. I called Bill at the Exxon station not far away. When the man from […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. There are many different ways to start applying W. Edwards Deming’s ideas on management. There isn’t a cookbook on what should be done first. This is helpful in that you can avoid trying things that would be very difficult given the current state of your management system. However, it […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. On the Use of Theory is an article W. Edwards Deming published in 1956. It is one of many of his papers we have posted on our web site. Though 58 years old the ideas in the article are very useful today and yet many organizations still have not […]
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Guest post by Michael Ballé (repost from his Gemba Coach column on Lean.org) Dear Gemba Coach, For product development you need creative (maybe even chaotic) people. Are those people suited to follow such a structured method as lean? Like trying to achieve one-piece-flow in product development? Thank you. What an interesting question! As a writer […]
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Which brings us to response time targets. Putting aside the arguments that numerical targets are arbitrary and prone to causing dysfunctional behaviour*, a critical further point is that targets do not provide a method. Neither do they provide additional capacity for achieving the improvements sought. Therefore, setting an arbitrary numerical target for response times (or anything else), simply does not change anything about those systems conditions that dictate predictable levels of performance. The system will produce what it’s capable of producing, whether the target is there or not.
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