Tag: continual improvement

Management Improvement Jobs

• Director of Process Improvement

• Manufacturing Engineer

Management Books

• Fourth Generation Management: The New Business Consciousness by Brian Joiner
  An excellent book for those who wish to begin the transformation to "Fourth Generation Management" and for the experienced as well. We give this well written and easy to follow book this book our highest recommendation.

• The Leader's Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done by Peter R. Scholtes
  Absolutely wonderful book - we give it our highest recommendation.

• Evolutionary Operation: A Statistical Method for Process Improvement by George E. P. Box, Norman R. Draper
  Evolutionary Operation (EVOP), is a simple but powerful statistical tool with wide application in business. What originally motivated the introduction of EVOP, was the idea that the widespread and daily use of simple statistical design and analysis during routine production by process operatives themselves could reap enormous additional rewards.

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance by Gerald J. Langley, Thomas Nolan, Lloyd P. Provost, Cliff Norman
  Great handbook for process improvement. The best resource for applying the plan-do-study-act cycle to improvement.

• The New Economics: : For Industry, Government, Education by W. Edwards Deming
  Second Edition (reprint). The best of Deming's books for learning about his system for management. Packed with great thoughts but not as easy to read as the best books. This is a great book, but often it is best for managers already committed to finding new ideas.

• Out of the Crisis: by W. Edwards Deming
  A classic but not an easy book to read. Packed with good ideas that still have great merit. New paperback printing (2000).

• Team Handbook: Third Edition by Peter R. Scholtes, Brian Joiner, Barbara J. Streibel
  Most recent update to the management classic.

• Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction by Mark Graban
  

• Improving Almost Anything: by George E. P. Box
  

• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother
  "Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress—and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture." —Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way

• 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.

• Gemba Walks: by Jim Womack
  This book complies Womack's essays on the practice of lean and adds some additional context to the essays.

Management Articles

• Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management
  The aim of this guidebook is to help small businesses make the transition to a quality culture. While the focus of the guidebook is small businesses the information is helpful to anyone transforming and continually improving their organization.

• Quality in the Community: One City's Experience by George E. P. Box, Laurel W. Joiner, Sue Rohan
  Highlights the evolution of the Quality movement in Madison, Wisconsin and the role of the Madison Area Quality Improvement Network during the 1980's.

• Total Quality Leadership vs. Management by Results by Brian Joiner, Peter R. Scholtes
  Excellent article for those interested in improving management. It begins with a very short early 90's view on the increasing Asian economic clout. Those who are not interested in management improvement would likely be tempted to ignore the important...

• William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box
  This is the text of a talk given at the Speakers' Dinner at the Sixth Annual William G. Hunter Conference on Quality in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 2, 1993. In it, George Box recalls Bill Hunter's pivotal role in the birth of the quality movement in the c

• Dr. Demings 1950 Lecture to Japanese Top Management
  "In 1950, Dr. Deming gave a lecture to 80% of the top management people in Japan. What follows is a English translation of the original Japanese transcript. John Dowd made this happen a few years back and has agreed to share it with the Deming Community."

• A Systemic Approach for Improving An Organization - That Makes a Difference to the Customer by Dave Nave
  "Management's job in the area of improvement is to create and facilitate an environment for learning and cooperation. One area to start is to remove policies and barriers that inhibit people from doing a good job. At the same time, encourage communication...

• Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail by Esther Derby
  "Choosing Actions the Team Doesn’t Have Energy For... They may have tried before and failed, the task may be too difficult or time-consuming given the other work they have to do, or the work may be plain unpleasant. In any case, when the team doesn’t have energy to work on an improvement, chances are pretty good it won’t get done. Go with the task the team has the energy to complete."

• Managing Our Way to Economic Success: Two Untapped Resources by William G. Hunter
  "American organizations could compete much better at home and abroad if they would learn to tap the potential information inherent in all processes and the creativity inherent in all employees."

• Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin by William G. Hunter, Jan O'Neill, Carol Wallen
  "The new quality improvement ideas can help public officials combat the effects of decreasing budgets just as they help private businesses increase productivity." Published in Quality Progress, July 1987.

• Lean Thinking and Management by John Hunter
  "The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go 'up' the organization chart."

• Jeff Bezos's mission: Compelling small publishers to think big by Jeff Bezos
  "I would hope people would say that Amazon is earth's most customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers. Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work forward from their skills. They say this is what we're good at, and this is what we'll do. It's a very different approach from saying here is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need. ... the key is that the company has to experiment, and what you want to try and do is reduce the cost of experimentation so you can do as many experiments per unit time as possible ... and they're not experiments if you know they're going to work."

• Metrics and Software Development by John Hunter
  "I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system 'big picture') the most useful strategy. The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone. But those process measures can be selected to measure key processes within the system..."

• How to Apply Japanese Company-Wide Quality Control in Other Countries by Kaoru Ishikawa
  Kaoru Ishikawa highlights how to improve performance based on 20 years of experience visiting countries all over the world to give consult on quality control implementation.

• An Introduction to Deming’s Management Ideas by Peter R. Scholtes
  An Introduction to Deming's Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes – webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008.

• You say tomato, I say tomato by Tom Southworth
  "To me, Lean has at its core four very simple ideals. It is: safer, easier better, economical"

• Why the retrospective is not a lessons learned meeting
  "Just real, useful, insightful and timely agreements about what we're doing NOW to be even better than we were last time. That's the retrospective."

• Actionable Metrics by John Hunter
  "Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can't think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking."

• Approaching a Minimum Viable Product
  "The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you'll need enough money to answer them all."

• Resist your machine thinking! by Jeffrey Liker
  "To maintain consistent output, one must continually adjust the system to changing environmental conditions. This is called dynamic homeostasis in systems thinking, or running to stay in place. ... Maintenance comes from having clearly defined standards, observing carefully for deviations from those standards, and then developing and implementing countermeasures to eliminate the deviations."

• Robust Experimental Strategies for Improving Upstream Productivity by Ronald D. Snee
  The solution to this problem is to use Lean principles to streamline the processes and procedures used to do the experimental work. Eliminating complexity and wasted time and effort results in experimentation being speeded up and scientists having more time to do creative work.

• Deming's14 points are not a menu you can pick and choose from. by David Joyce
  "Everyone should search continually for problems in order to improve every activity in the company, to improve quality and productivity and thus to constantly decrease costs. Finding what’s wrong is not improvement. Plugging leaks is not improvement. Don’t look at outcomes or defects, instead look at what produces the defects."

• You are Solving the Wrong Problem
  "The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. ... When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again."

• 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. "

• The Gemba Walk by Norman Bodek
  "the plant manager got up from behind his desk. He asked me to join him on his daily walk; in fact he told me that he walked the plant twice a day every day and that it was the most valuable part of his day... The plant manager asked those questions and you could see the excitement on the face of the supervisor as he was answering the questions. I learned that there’s enormous power in the leader asking questions and then just listening – yes; this is the key to ask the question and then to just listen carefully, not judgmentally."

• Rounding for Outcomes
  "Rounding for Outcomes is the consistent practice of asking specific questions of key stakeholders—leaders, employees, physicians and patients—to obtain actionable information... The focus of questions during rounding are to: > Build relationships... > Harvest "wins" to learn what is going well... > Identify process improvement areas..."

• Are lean principles universal? by Michael Ballé
  "There is only one golden rule: we make people before we make parts. This requires a spirit of challenge, open mind and teamwork, as Pascal Dennis phrased it in his great lean novel Andy and Me. Every industry is different, but all human beings share the same capabilities and potentials – that is universal. As one Sensei once told me, the biggest room is the room for improvement."

• 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..."

• Eight guidelines for closing the knowing-doing gap by Jason Yip
  "Why before How: philosophy is important. Focus on Why (philosophy, general guidance) before How (detailed practices, behaviours, techniques) ... Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts. Ready, fire, aim. Act even if you haven't had the time to fully plan the action..."

• 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..."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• W. Edwards Deming Institute by W. Edwards Deming
  Founded by W. Edwards Deming the institute carries forward his philosophy. The site includes information on the institutes annual conferences and offers newsletters online.

• 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.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Toyota Production System
  Site on Toyota.com. "The Toyota Production System (TPS) was established based on two concepts: The first is called 'jidoka'(which can be loosely translated as 'automation with a human touch') which means that when a problem occurs, the equipment stops immediately, preventing defective products from being produced; The second is the concept of 'Just-in-Time,' in which each process produces only what is needed by the next process in a continuous flow."

• Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter
  Founded in 1985 by George E.P. Box and the William Hunter at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The technical report series is one of the best online management resources with reports authors including: George Box, W. Edwards Deming, Peter Scholtes, Kaoru Ishikawa, William Hunter, Gipsie Ranney and Brian Joiner.

• Institute for Healthcare Improvement
  IHI works to accelerate improvement by building the will for change, cultivating promising concepts for improving patient care, and helping health care systems put those ideas into action. White papers available online on topics such as: Planning for Scale: Going Lean in Health Care, A Guide for Designing Large-Scale Improvement Initiatives, A Framework for Spread: From Local Improvements to System-Wide Change, and Seven Leadership Leverage Points for Organization-Level Improvement in Health Care.

• Associates in Process Improvement
  Consulting firm with Provost, Langley, Norman, Moen and Nolan. Authors of the excellent: Improvement Guide. Several very good articles on variation available on the site.

• Peter Scholtes by Peter R. Scholtes
  Web site of Peter Scholtes, author of The Leader's Handbook (an excellent book) and The Team Handbook. The site offers several excellent management articles. He taught with Deming. Peter was a good friend and his management ideas are well worth studying.

• Be More Careful by Mark Graban
  A Collection of workplace signs and posters that don't get to the root cause.

• PQ Systems
  Software and services provider related to SPC tools. The site includes a blog.

• Langford for Learning by David P. Langford
  Quality learning achieved through continual improvement of systems which aim to produce the optimum state of personal, social, physical, and intellectual development within each individual. It is a commitment to excellence by each individual and is achieved through teamwork and a process of continual improvement and/or redesign. The site includes worthwhile articles.

• 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.

• Lean Edge by Michael Ballé, H. Thomas Johnson, Daniel T. Jones, Art Smalley, Steven Spear, Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "Lean management is a method to dramatically improve business performance by teaching people how to improve their own processes. The two main dimensions of lean management are continuous process improvement (going and seeing problems at the source, challenging operations and improving step by step) and respect for people (developing and engaging employees by developing teamwork, problem solving and respect for customers, employees and all other partners). ... The aim of the discussion [on the site] is to share different points of view and to collectively build a vision of lean management."