continuous+improvement category archives

A week ago, the Sunday Boston Globe carried a piece on Eugene Litvak's work on helping hospitals improve. Flow is the key.

A colleague forwarded a copy of "Manage a Living system, Not a Ledger" by H. Thomas Johnson. It is a great discussion of why traditional financial measures, while required for accounting reporting, are terrible for internal decision making.

There are plenty of things I do individually and that I see in business that make things better. But there seem to be just as many, if not more, that are merely a change without any obvious benefit.

Some good writing advice from Derek Lowe and some thoughts on LEAN-that-isn't from Mark Graban.

Tom Davenport has an interesting claim and discussion of Why Six Sigma is on the Downslope for business process improvement. He lists five big problems, and then there is the discussion of what to do next.

Jon Miller suggests there are problems with problem statements in Top 10 Problems with Problem Statements.

Scott Selhorst gives a basic education in "The Difference Between Correlation and Causality."

Is multitasking a good idea or not? Let's define it and clarify what it is that bothers me about working on multiple tasks at once.

Kent Greenes writes "Learning fast to stay relevant in a flat world." It's a nice, brief description of the Lessons Learned process as practiced by the Army and as described in Learning to Fly. I also like the link Kent makes to the importance of learning and reflection.

The December 2005 Business 2.0 has an article about Dell's newest manufacturing facility that may reflect theory of constraints principles: "Dude, You're Getting a Dell--Every Five Seconds."

Pop quiz: Do you want a bottleneck in your business? Why or why not?

Michael McLaughlin writes "The Worst Thing About Best Practices." In isolation, I absolutely agree with McLaughlin. However, if they are part of an intelligent process, such as he suggests at the end of the article, best practices can be quite helpful.

[Discovered this unpublished draft from last September] Fortune: A Big Maker of Tiny Batches about Rockwell-Collins' operations: The virtual factory has had an unexpected effect on productivity. When a product arrives from another plant, it gets a fresh look. Besides a natural attitude of "anything they can do, we can do...

Tom Collins at Knowledge Aforethought had some interesting thoughts about "best practices" two weeks ago. Here's the last paragraph of the article: Knowledge Aforethought: "Best-yet" practices - DO NOT RE-FREEZE If we "re-froze" the prior experience into the organizational "best practices" would anyone even look for the newer, better solutions? His...

It looks like Jakob Nielsen gets lost in the same hole many others do when using statistics to drive a point.

John Parkinson, Chief Technologist for the Americas for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, spoke at the KMPro Chicago meeting last night on the topic of The Real Time Enterprise.

Two interesting comments recently that remind us to be careful what we are measuring and what we are reporting. Anything beyond the basic measurement of length, mass and value are always biased -- and someone could probably argue that these are biased too. Acknowledging the bias up front helps us make...

Here's an article that tries to apply DMAIC to a church environment. I am learning more about Six Sigma myself, but why not apply to other types of organizations.

Review of Alan Larson's Demystifying Six Sigma from 2003.