Lean, Service Design and Lean Startup

The next crucial level of organizational effectiveness: Lean Service Design. I have the pleasure of introducing Sara Coene (@saracoene) through this guest blog post. Sara is a Lean Service and Process Consultant and co-founder of Storites. She helps companies develop creative ideas and concepts to adapt their processes, business models and services to the desires Read More …

Is Quality Function Deployment still useful

Are Quality Function Deployment, Voice of Customer and Kano Models still relevant? In an upcoming podcast with  Robin Lawton I asked the question: “You talk about two failures in QFD, which is Quality Function Deployment. They’re determining who the customer is and how to define and separate customer desired outcomes from product functions and features. Read More …

Management Matters to a Curious Cat

John Hunter has been writing about management online since 1995. He has shared ideas on management via his blog, Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog, since 2005 and recently as the new author of the Dr. Deming blog hosted by the W.Edwards Deming Institute. In John’s new book, Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability,  he looks at Read More …

Structural Lean and Leader Standard Work

In the research paper, Relations between Lean Management and Organizational Structures, the authors came to this conclusion: Lean management can be a very effective management method, but, as the practice shows, it must be treated as a holistic approach directed to changing the whole company. Having the knowledge about the principles of the method, there Read More …

Dr. Deming 7 Deadly Diseases +2

Dr. Deming and Curious Cat blog author, John Hunter has published a new book, Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability that can be found on his website. I interviewed John about his book, which you will hear next week. I extracted a short portion of the audio where John discusses adding two new deadly diseases of Read More …

What kind of problem solving is that

When I first started working years ago there seem to be a fairly prescriptive way of doing things. In sales: We used Rackman’s SPIN Selling techniques and of course, we did this with the decision maker. In Marketing: We looked at three different lead generation techniques – Public Relations, Advertising and Referrals. In operations: We Read More …