I am preparing to speak to a Project Management group in Austin this afternoon.  My preparation included reading a few PMI articles, one of which was quite interesting to the Lean Six Sigma side of me.  What Causes Bad Estimates… and What You Can Do About It by James T. Brown.  It was found on the [...]

As I traveled for the Christmas Holiday this year I was in Seattle, near where I grew up.  It is a long ways from Texas where I currently live.  All of the people I saw were living their lives with very little conception of the world outside of their hometown, possibly just what can be [...]

I just finished reading an article on CNET, The Inside Story about how Microsoft Killed the Courier Tablet by Jay Greene, about how Microsoft developed a tablet that could have been released a few months after the first Apple iPad and they cancelled the project because it was not like their current products.  You should [...]

A book review of “thinking, fast and slow” in the wall street journal was interesting. The author evaluated decisions and found two mechanisms. A quick association and slow logic. Example: a left wing women who routinely protests the war. What is her job? A bank teller or a bank teller who is a feminist ? [...]

I wrote a post, a few days ago, about what may be involved in the decision to change.  I read another view in an article that ascribed the decision as being made by the board when they hired the new CEO from SAP.  They brought in a CEO that knows the software and service business [...]

I had a student talk about their organization’s biggest issue was completing projects that were never implemented.  In the discussion, it came out that their organization transferred the implementation plan to the process owner after it was written.  The BB did not keep the lead through improve and control.  I believe that this is not [...]

I am feeling out of touch from the world of process improvement.  I am researching a few topics and have found that what I know as simple process mapping is not “the thing to do” any more.  I learned my process mapping 20 or more years ago and it has done me well.  Rectangles for [...]

I was talking with a client this week about the problems with Quality Assurance.  We talked about how difficult it is, at times, to solve quality problems.  Her last effort went from a quality engineer type effort to a reliability engineer effort, which took a lot of skill upgrading.  This is a topic I wrote [...]

I spoke at a workshop in London this week to Quality directors of major mulitnational food companies.  It was surprising that they are worried about their continued roll as the regulators of the organization.  One person said they were called the department of non-productivity.  I do agree many quality organizations fight with the operations departments [...]

An editorial in the December 21 Wall Street Journal discusses the impact of a tax rate change in Oregon.  The point of this posting is that predicting outcomes is not easy. In Oregon’s case, the state voted to increase the marginal tax rate on the wealthy by ~2%.  They predicted the financial benefit to the [...]