Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections

curiouscat.com > Management Improvement > Library > New Additions   see our Management Encyclopedia

Curious Cat Management Improvement Library - New Additions

• Kanban Software Development Oversimplified   by Jeff Patton,   Apr 2009  
  "Recently I've heard lots of discussion about Kanban style development  an approach that breaks that breaks the primary rule of today's common agile practice: the fixed development time-box... Its common for Agile teams to put the stories in a current time-box on a board with columns for the stages stories go through such as "development" and "testing." The Kanban board is similar  with a few more rules..."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• How to Escape Mundanity   by Pamela Slim and Guy Kawasaki,   May 2009  
  "Start by testing and prototyping very small parts of your business. You dont have to set up a huge infrastructure or print shiny brochures or to buy new equipment. Be ruthless about getting as much information and coaching as you can for free. People are very generous with good content, and you can learn tons by reading smart blogs and attending free teleclasses or seminars. With limited resources, you may want to stay away from businesses that have high operating costs and stick with a web-based model that you can get started for very little money"
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Manufacturing plant as classroom: Reinventing continuous learning   by Bonnie Del Conte,   Mar 2009  
  "Team members are required to study the Lean philosophy and methodologies, and can choose to take twelve core courses in the companys Dur-A-Flex University, an in-house education program that operates primarily during the lunch hour. 'We want every owner to learn not just about Lean, but about every aspect of our business  from chemistry to installation techniques, finance, IT and accounting,' said Greider. 'As a result, our team members identify and solve problems, and flexibly move about as needed throughout the business, zigging and zagging and making their own decisions along the way.'"
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Improving Our Systems of Learning   by Michael King and Jane Kovacs,   Mar 2009  
  We have shown that the Quality approach calls upon each of us to redefine our job to that of improving the system for which we are responsible, with the help of those working in the system. We have also presented evidence that demonstrates that when we adopt the Quality approach, things do improve. We therefore propose that: It is the job of everyone in education to continuously improve the system of learning for which they are responsible, with the help of those working in the system.
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Practical Combinatorial Testing: Beyond Pairwise   by Rick Kuhn, Yu Lei and Raghu Kacker,   Jun 2008  
  "Within the NASA database application, for example, 67 percent of the failures were triggered by only a single parameter value, 93 percent by two-way combinations, and 98 percent by three-way combinations. The detection-rate curves for the other applications studied are similar, reaching 100 percent detection with four- to six-way interactions."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• America's Monumental Failure of Management   by Henry Mintzberg,   Mar 2009  
  "The problem has been evident for a long time. Executive compensation, the most evident manifestation of this legal corruption of management, was labeled scandalous by Fortune magazine more than 20 years ago, and repeatedly ever since, to no avail. While America escalated its love affair with leadership, its corporate leaders singled themselves out for increasingly obscene pay packages, all the while extolling the virtues of teamwork and sustainable enterprise."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Control Charting Seasonal Data   by Lynda Finn,   Mar 2009  
  How to create a control chart for seasonal or trending data where there is an underlying structural variation in the data. Essentially you need to account for the structural variation to create the control limits for the control chart.
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• How to be a program manager   by Joel Spolsky,   Mar 2009  
  "Mostly, becoming a program manager is about learning: learning about technology, learning about people, and learning how to be effective in a political organization. A good program manager combines an engineers approach to designing technology with a politicians ability to build consensus and bring people together."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Agile teams, fragile teams   by Wayne Turmel,   Feb 2009  
  "On the surface, it would seem that Agile is a great solution to the challenges of a modern workplace. But there are potential problems with the way people manage in this environment - problems that are easily handled if the manager is aware of the dangers but can become crippling if they're not For a start, because the focus is on small tasks requiring intense concentration, it's really easy to lose track of what's happening in the rest of the company and open yourself to ugly surprises at budget time."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Remembering NUMMI   by Gipsie Ranney,   Jan 2009  
  "The most remarkable insight I gained at NUMMI came as an answer to a question from a member of the touring group. The person asked what had been learned about the reasons that management/labor conflict had been reduced so much. The tour guide answered, "The answer we get from members of the labor force is that the Japanese do what they say they will do." This was the same labor force that had held the record for most grievances filed per year in an assembly plant in the U.S. ... The Big Three are responsible for managing their organizations wisely. I think that will take more than money. It will take a different culture and a different mind."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• A Disruptive Solution for Health Care   by Clayton Christensen and Jason Hwang,   Feb 2009  
  "by specifically targeting these customers who have been excluded from the traditional marketplace, disruptive business models can first establish a foothold outside the normal competitive space before moving in to compete against the incumbent firms... Similarly, we expect health IT to make its initial impact not via a nationwide, interoperable system based on open standards, but rather in the nonconsuming periphery of the health-care provider value network." See video
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Gemba-Based Leadership  Not Just for Chief Engineers   by John Shook,   Nov 0002  
  "Here's what lean practitioners do: grasp the situation, look for facts at the gemba, as opposed to analyzing data removed from it in time and place, and go through the Deming management cycle."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Artists, Not Assholes   by Jim Nieters,   Nov 2008  
  "In this case, the manager should have taken a stand, opposing the destructive behavior of the complainer. He should have supported his artisan. Instead, he responded by telling the two employees to get along, which was silly, because the artisan had done nothing wrong. The manager also took some responsibility away from the artisan and gave it to the complainer. Really, that seemed the easiest way. He wanted to stem the flow of complaints; make the dissonance go away."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• How to Handle Multiple Customers   by Jurgen Appelo,   Jan 2009  
  "Balancing work for multiple customers is a tough problem. You will have optimal results by optimizing resource allocation in such a way that all customers are just a little bit happy. And it is true that you should minimize the amount of task-switching between projects. If you can consolidate all maintenance work in one week per month, instead of one day per week, then do it! Likewise, aftercare in 2,5 days of 8 hours would be much better than 10 days of 2 hours. Im sure you get the picture."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• How to Develop Products like Toyota   Nov 2008  
  "Toyota tends to stay as flexible as possible until relatively late in the development stage. He cites as an example Toyotas practice of leaving manufacturing tolerances to be set by die makers rather than by design engineers creating the prints. Die makers make die dimensions as close as practical to those in the CAD database, but have the flexibility to modify them so body parts fit together well. Manufacturing engineers then set tolerances around manufacturing capabilities."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business   by Chris Anderson,   Feb 2008  
  "But free is not quite as simple  or as stupid  as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they're distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties  buyers and sellers  to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Statistics as a Catalyst to Learning by Scientific Method   by George Box,   Jun 1999  
  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.
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review

• Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map   by Davis Balestracci,   Feb 2006  
  "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. It's hardly an advanced technique, but it leads to much more effective optimization and process control."
  Rating: No Reviews - add your review