Wednesday, March 31, 2004

In some of my subscriptions, I've been reading lately a lot of comments about how horrible multi-tasking is to productivity...and that folks should not be able to start one task until their current one is completed.  That sure doesn't sound appealing to people with ADD like me (okay, I'm only self-diagnosed).  I do occasionally have to block out time to sit down and churn through one thing, but I like that I can work on a lot of differen things throughout my day too.  Middle ground?  Deadlines, with some free time built in.  Free time!  Yay! Comments9:17:09 AM

Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, or accept another's dogmatism.      -- Ralph Waldo Emerson I love that Ralph.  heh.  In case you haven't noticed, I like these frequent reminders to explore and question and look beyond the obvious. It's not always easy or natural, unfortunately, but it sure makes things more interesting. Comments9:13:53 AM

Interesting thought from Frank Patrick: http://www.focusedperformance.com/2004_03_01_blarch.html#108074036345149945 Busy People or Productive Organization -- What is the distinction between... "We need to get the most out of our people?" and "We need to get the most out of our organization?" ...other than the fact that the former leads one to the idea of keeping everyone busy and the latter, if taken seriously, leads one to making sure that they aren't. Just something to think about. Do you ever feel like you're running around like a chicken with it's head cut off and getting nowhere?  Sometimes I think I would get further and faster if things could be a little more easygoing and there was more time for thinking, rather than feeling like we're expected to be busy every minute.  Comments9:08:30 AM

Some interesting observations below on management throwing a schedule off-course.  http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/Tampering.html I've been doing a lot of reading about Control Charts and Statistical Process Control recently - of which more to come later this year. One aspect of managing using control charts which was first articulated by Walter Shewhart, the father of the method, is a phenomenum known as "tampering". Tampering is management by reaction without recognition to the natural variance which occurs in a process. Tampering is amplification of common cause variance to the point where an otherwise controlled system can become chaotic. It is a fault of inexperienced and untrained managers to react to common cause variance - often in a heavy handed fashion. Their actions, regardless of what, result in tampering with the system and consequent amplification of variance turning it into an assigned cause problem. It so happens that the assigned cause is the management intervention. This paper by Gemba Research advises Lean practitioners to beware of tampering because they might just make things worse rather than better. Deming (originally Deming’s teacher Shewhart) said "tampering" is the changing of a process in reaction to just one instance of its output. Tampering is depending on intuition and common sense. Deming demonstrated through many examples that this can often make things worse, not better. Comments9:03:09 AM

© Copyright 2004 Rebecca Schwoch. Last update: 10/15/2004; 5:01:00 PM.