Tag: best practices

Management Articles

• Combinatorial Software Testing by Rick Kuhn, Raghu Kacker, Yu Lei, Justin Hunter
  While the most basic form of combinatorial testing, pairwise, is well established, and adoption by software testing practitioners continues to increase, industry usage of these methods remains patchy at best. However, the additional training required is

• Why Lean Programs Fail by Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "a large survey conducted by Industry Week in 2007 found that only 2 percent of companies achieved their anticipated results... When we look at lean in this way it is not only a set of techniques for eliminating waste, but a process by which managers as leaders develop people so that desired results can be achieved, again and again. That means coaching people in practicing an improvement kata every day."

• 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. "

• 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..."

• 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

• 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.