Unlocking Innovation Productivity (Proven Strategies that Have Transformed Organizations for Profitable and Predictable New Product Growth Worldwide) by Mike Dalton is a guide to the challenges of product innovation and how to overcome them. He provides seven cumulative strategies to improve innovation, all based on Critical Chain Project Management and the underlying Theory of Constraints.
Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization by Domenico Lepore, Angela Montgomery and Giovanni Siepe. It's a good read for people interested in management and creating ever-flourishing organizations.
A video about multitasking told from the perspective of a design engineer who was lost in the world of multitasking - it took him four weeks to do a 2-4 day design task.
The latest DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast has a great discussion from Julie Zhou, VP of Product Design at Facebook, about creating great solutions to problems. You need to define the problem well!
Steve Holcomb has an article on LinkedIn that describes a nice success story in using the TOC concept of Throughput Accounting to guide decision making and bring a company back to profitability. This reminds me of a similar project I had.
How many projects in businesses today are focused on building / implementing a solution without understanding why? Your problem isn't the lack of a solution.
Another tool to help knowledge workers get to what they need quickly. I've been trying Atlas Recall over the last month. The general idea is that it sits on your computer (Mac currently, Windows soon) and keeps track of everything you see. And then if you are trying to recall "where did I see X", you can ask Atlas Recall for help. It does exactly that: will show you what you have seen, whether it was on the web or in a chat session or in documents you've been writing / reading.
Sunday's Boston Globe Magazine section had a feature on "best places to work" and many smaller articles on the modern workplace. I thought a few of these had bearing on knowledge workers.
Kristin Cox has been honored as one of eight Public Officials of the Year by Governing Magazine. She has presented keynote addresses at TOC ICO, talking about how she has used Theory of Constraints in her work in Utah's Office of Management and Budget. It's nice to see this acknowledged in a public way.
"The rule of five" is a new-to-me idea for managing multitasking at the individual level. It's a combination of the task board and the idea of dropping things to the floor. Have an explicit list and keep it in control. Interesting.
My focus in "process improvement" circles has to do with Theory of Constraints concepts and approaches, but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating other approaches as well. One of the ideas that comes up in the Lean world is that of Respect for People.
I've been involved in knowledge management for nearly 20 years. And over most of that time, one of the most familiar ideas is that we spend 20% of their time searching for stuff. I wonder. Is this 20% of time truly wasted?
My network is not the vast number of people I'm connected to on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.
Breakthrough Project Management from Ian Heptinstall and Robert Bolton is a brief guide to getting significantly improved project performance through combining two management approaches: One is Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) and the other is collaborative contracting. For me the material on CCPM is a confirmation of what I have been doing for many years. And the material on Project Alliancing is new, and yet it rings bells for ensuring successful projects of any type.
Everyone wants to kill email. I'm no fan of it either, but it does serve a purpose - a purpose that no other tool serves quite as well. Or more specifically, better than any SINGLE tool serves.
I came across a great illustration by Henrik Kniberg, summarizing a talk he did recently on the topic of how to create and maintain focus. The blog post is a set of short commentary, all revolving around the three points illustrated: Create slack; Say no; Stop thinking, "I don't have time".
It's 18 October 2016, and it is the annual occurrence of Information Overload Awareness day. It's not like we forget we are overloaded every other day of the year.
Advertising is not a topic I normally worry about, but somehow the topic of "Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You're Selling" by Josh Weltman goes beyond just about advertising. I like to think that this topic can be thought of beyond purely advertising into other areas where one might need to get people to "buy."
The project management community like to point to examples of really bad project management. Every once in awhile, there are examples of extremely good project management as well. These are all videos, but they get the story across
What does "continuous improvement" mean? What does it mean to you? There is a strong connection to humility and acknowledging that "I don't know". Or at least, I have more to learn.
