I've always thought the idea of context was interesting. Johanna Rothman thinks so too, "We all start from our own contexts."
Depending on who you talk to and where you listen, the Lean and Theory of Constraints communities are either close partners or opposing players in the "continuous improvement" arena. But from my perspective they are much closer to being friendly than opponents.
Ajai Kapoor has a nice piece on LinkedIn Pulse where he says, "Please STOP planning ... Really." He recounts the familiar challenge of plan / don't plan. Plan because we want to direct our efforts into the right places to achieve some goal. But don't plan because plans never survive contact with the enemy.
Mike Dalton has a nice series of articles on project management in Industry Week (and copied to LinkedIn Pulse). "Are Your Plans Realistic & Robust?" entry is on planning and using the CCPM approach to construct a plan.
Want to be more effective in your work? Stop "just checking" those notifications. They drain your attention and slow you down.
Steve Holt gave a talk entitled "Stay on the Red Curve by Making Your Own Products Obsolete." He touched on a lot of topics, but the general idea is that the competitive advantage linked to innovations (in product, service, etc) can only last so long for a business.
Dee Jacob (author of Velocity) provided a workshop of a game she has been developing over many years of practice in critical chain project management. I have looked around for games or simulations to help highlight the critical pieces of critical chain, and this is the best I've seen.
Henry Camp told a parable about his own experience in trying to motivate people, in particular his sales staff. I cannot do the story justice, so I won't. Henry is a great storyteller, and he's always given off a warm, humble-but-understanding vibe. Maybe that's his Louisville roots.
Kevin Kohls had a great talk on the topic of The "Bad Luck" Obstacle - Management Churn. Essentially, he is asking the question of how people who do TOC (or any other) implementations deal with the fact of life in organization: management moves around.
Another talk on Strategy & Tactics Trees at the conference came from Michael Hannan. In this presentation he suggested updating the current "projects" S&T Tree to be more universal to any project-delivery organization.
John Ricketts from IBM talked about his view that S&T trees should be dynamic, because the assumptions under which the S&T was built could change. One must be able to pivot as the underlying conditions change.
Along with the detailed posts I've written in the past few days, there are plenty of interesting ideas and hallway conversations. Here are some of those. And a few more posts after this one.
Sanjeev Gupta of Realization hosted a great conversation, describing his perspective on "what is TOC" (always an entertaining discussion) and what might be needed to improve the adoption of Theory of Constraints in business. The summary: TOC is not a philosophy. It is an operations management system based on three theorems.
Rob Newbold of ProChain (and author of a number of books on CCPM) has been thinking about updating the practice of CCPM around the planning and scheduling of CCPM projects. He presented four concepts that he's implemented, most of them seem reasonable. I don't know if they are all really needed though.
Justin Roff-Marsh has a serious passion for the sales function in business - reinventing and making it into a machine for growth. His talk at this TOCICO conference followed along this path.
Lisa Scheinkopf of Goldratt Schools discussed her thinking behind a different approach to bringing more and more people to learn TOC.
Eli Schragenheim presented on "Managing Under Uncertainty in the TOC Way," expanding on the idea that we should never say, "I know." Nor should we think, "I don't know." How do we use what we DO know to help deal with uncertainty?
How to break the global vs local conflict in organizations or systems that are very big (complex - or at least big enough that there is not time to fully understand the system).
One of the challenges all along for TOC Thinking Processes has been the perception that it is very focused on Logic without connection to the more "human" elements. It's not accurate, of course. Rami Goldratt discussed this in the context of Kristen Cox's morning keynote at the TOCICO conference.
Excellent keynote by Kristen Cox on her journey (so far) of implementing Theory of Constraints in the Utah state government, from her position as the head of the Governor's Office of Management and Budget.