Manufacturing buffers help to smooth over problems at each stage of production. The project management tool "honesty buffer" is when someone holds back reporting issues and problems to make things look better than they are. Reducing or eliminating such buffers quickly exposes problems and enables rapid process and quality improvement.
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October 29, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Communication, Reporting
As quality went up, our productivity skyrocketed.
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October 19, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
While we teach our young the errors of our ways, we need to help them understand that doing what is right is often hard. I tell them that if they don't learn to do better than we did, then their kids will be telling them that the current woes of the world were brought about by their irresponsible actions. They deny it of course, but that is the wonder and optimism of youth.
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October 15, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Personal Practices
Improving team performance is as much about attitude as it is about using specific project management techniques to improve quality. Here, "It Should Work The First Time" caught the imagination of the staff and became a cultural and performance changing philosophy
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October 13, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
Making a real change is rarely easy. A real change, one that goes to the heart of a fundamental problem, is usually very difficult, but doable.
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October 11, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Schedule
The key step? We have to change something that will actually help us. Here, “test every line of code” made a huge difference in this software organization. This is the first of several articles on basic changes that made a huge difference and why they worked.
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October 8, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
A busy project test organization can mean your products are having problems. In this case however, the fact they were very busy helped the test organization to stay objective about reporting dramatically improved test results without missing a beat. Other test teams described in this series of articles reacted in inefficient ways when product quality improved dramatically.
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October 4, 2009 Bruce Benson
Testing