Books
Tags
Authors
Articles
Sites
Jobs
 
Login
Register
Tag: evidence based management
Management Books
-
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.
Management Articles
-
Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map
by
Davis Balestracci
"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."
-
Focus on Discovery, Not Decision-Making, Is Key To Success
by
Steven Spear
"The challenge is devising a new approach to managing systems so complex that 'thinking our way' to adequate, let alone perfect, designs is impossible. We are now in an age in which management must instead focus on constant discovery and innovation – relentlessly learning better ways to do work and learning that there is better work to do.
-
Robust Experimental Strategies for Improving Upstream Productivity
by
Ronald D. Snee
Two methods can be used to increase the speed of upstream development, which in turn speeds up the development of process understanding:
* using Design of Experiments (DOE)-based strategies to design, analyze, and interpret experiments, resulting in getting better information in a timely fashion
* using Lean principles to streamline the availability of information, materials, equipment, measurements, and personnel for the experimental process, thereby accelerating the flow of the experimental process.
-
It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
by
Jason Yip
"It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity.
...
Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."
-
Variation, So Meaningful Yet So Misunderstood
by
Lynda Finn
"assuming an issue is the result of a special cause will send you on a hunt for the special cause. Walter Shewhart and Deming proved that special cause thinking will lead you astray most of the time. So, if in your company there is often a search for whom or what is to blame before questioning whether the problem is built into the current processes and systems, then you too are likely wasting time and misidentifying causes."
-
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. "
-
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..."
-
Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient
by
John Allspaw
"for complex systems: there is no root cause.
...
Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes.
...
In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."
-
Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed
by
John Hunter
"The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A
-
An Accidental Statistician
by
George E. P. Box, R.A. Fisher
"At one point I was having trouble with a statistical problem. A very senior scientist suggested that I contact R. A. Fisher, who asked me to come and see him. The Army did not know how to send a sergeant to see a professor, so they made a railway warrant that said I was taking a horse to Cambridge. It was a beautiful day. Fisher said "let's go and sit under that tree in the orchard, I'll look up the probits and you look up the reciprocals". The specific problem was soon solved and set me thinking about estimating data transformations."
-
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."
Management Web Sites and Resources
-
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.
-
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.