performance

Project Management & Measurement gamed

April 30, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

Project management tends to be all about outcome metrics. Tracking costs vs. plan, Earned Value, Cost and Schedule Performance Indices, consumed slack – all are about what happened. Granted, there’s an effort inherent to those practices that says the future can be predicted by understanding the past, however, that approach also seems to indicate that errors are acceptable. Especially if we read a bunch of charts and graphs and variance analyses to tell us that we had a problem some number of days, or weeks, ago.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem good enough. [Read more]

Filed Under: Project Management, Useful Tools Tagged With: measurement, performance, Planning, process, project management

You are at the mercy of your analysts (and you don’t even know it)

April 24, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak 1 Comment

Anyone who has worked for any amount of time doing staff-level analytic work invariably knows that, when reports are presented, people will glance over the numbers looking for anomalies but never bother to understand the computation leading to what is in that report. Any attempt to explain the methodology results in blank stares, glassy eyes and, in many cases, utter disdain for wasting time explaining the math.

Unfortunately, what matters more than the number is the methodology. Information can be excluded and massaged. It can be changed to put a positive spin on the situation. As such, acting on information you don’t fully understand can lead to a disaster. [Read more]

Filed Under: Business Management, Operational Excellence, Planning & Measurement Tagged With: Leadership, Management, measurement, operational excellence, performance

ROWE: An attempt at achieving the Lean Ideal?

March 15, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak 4 Comments

In the past few months that I’ve been blogging about ROWE, I have been poking at how the two concepts might help to reinforce each other, with the premise that ROWE-thinking could help to enable Lean-thinking by overcoming the tools-based focus that is so prevalent in Lean implementations and, instead, returning the focus to the culture where I believe it belongs. fter stirring the pot and looking for the common ground between the two, I am now wondering if my original theory – that ROWE could enable Lean – was a bit backwards. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Continuous Improvement, Featured Posts, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Lean, performance, ROWE

Mark Hamel dives deeper into ROWE and Shingo; plus thoughts on the person vs. the organization

February 28, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

In the second half of the discussion or ROWE in the Shingo context taking place on Tim McMahon’s A Lean Journey blog, Mark Hamel, author of The Kaisen Event Fieldbook and a Shingo examiner, points out some of his concerns with ROWE.

Mark pointedly demonstrates where ROWE has strengths, but might not fully align with the Shingo model, as well as raising questions on a few of the underlying assumptions of ROWE.
[Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: Lean, Management, performance, ROWE

Guest post on A Lean Journey, and the weekly rewind

February 27, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

Today, I have a guest post appearing on Tim McMahon’s A Lean Journey Site. The Topic: ROWE in the context of the Shingo model. When Tim asked if I’d like to do a guest post on his site, I jumped at the chance. I also reached out to Mark Hamel, a blogger, an award-winning author for his book: The Kaizen Even Fieldbook, and a Shingo Prize examiner, for input. Mark wrote a complete post of his own which will appear on Tim’s site tomorrow. Mark dives even deeper into how ROWE aligns with the Shingo, and how it does not. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Continuous Improvement, Funny things, Operational Excellence, Random observations, Team Building & Human Capital, Uncategorized Tagged With: attitudes, Business strategy, Continuous Improvement, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Lean, Management, operational excellence, performance, ROWE, value, waste

An All or Nothing Attitude Usually Gets You Nothing

February 24, 2012 By Cory VanBuskirk Leave a Comment

A big trap in leading major improvements is to set massive and sweeping goals with no intermediate steps or sub-goals along the way. Here’s the trap. Because these goals are so massive, it ends up taking forever to just get it started or to generate any measurable results. Consequently, people see little or no progress, they get [...]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Continuous Improvement Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, Business strategy, Change Management, Continuous Improvement, performance, Strategy

You can’t bloviate your way to an improved workplace

January 10, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak 3 Comments

I think we’ve all encountered the senior manager who has been assigned to “fix” a dysfunctional chunk of the organization. Typically, they come in with a great many ideas, usually born from experiences in other situations, and then they begin to implement the tools that worked elsewhere. There’s often a short period of enthusiasm, if [...]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Team Building & Human Capital, Uncategorized Tagged With: attitudes, Change Management, Corporate Culture, Leadership, performance, Strategy

Shattering the rules: The too hard pile

January 4, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

It is because of fear that we look at change as being too hard. We believe the obstacles insurmountable. The deck is stacked against us, or maybe we just don’t know how – so we fear looking foolish if we fail. So we don’t try. We throw things on the Too Hard pile and forget about them. We throw them there, so we don’t try and we just accept. We accept until we start to believe things are this way for a reason. We believe long enough to start to defend it, and then the status quo reigns. That is a powerful load of inertia to overcome [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, Business strategy, Corporate Culture, Leadership, operational excellence, performance, Team Building

Understanding that Results are an absolute

December 21, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

As I continue to contemplate the machinations of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), I’ve had a few conversations recently with people who are trying to understand how ROWE works. While I am far fom an expert, I have come up with a few things in order to share my understanding. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital, Uncategorized Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, Continuous Improvement, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Management, motivation, operational excellence, performance, ROWE, Systems, Team Building, value, waste

Change exposes the boss, so there is no change

December 13, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

It’s no wonder that those in power resist transparency or programs that put a spotlight on their knowledge base. By doing “what the boss wants” as a means of getting promoted, these folks never developed a strong enough knowledge base to fully understand the position. Of course, no one would want to put that on display. The end result is fear – fear, on the boss’s part, that he or she will be exposed for having little to no knowledge of what in the hell it is their staffs do all day. [Read more]