In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized, a consultancy that aims to help companies design more humane products — from consumer packaged goods to software interfaces — and, son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems — to possibly answer reader’s questions about design, visual management, ethnography, genchi genbutsu, man-machine interactions, or anything related.  He accepted!

Students of the Toyota Production System will quickly see the very close parallels between humane design and the way Toyota approaches their treatment of people, work environments, and business. 

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The Toyota Production System makes effective use of visual cues to mark location in time and space, boundaries, and to answer the questions "How am I doing?", "Where am I?", "How do I use this?", and "What else needs to be done?".  Visual Cues are a simple but effective mechanism.

The assumption — and, what empirical evidence supports — is that we react and adjust automatically to objects and spaces that we encounter.  I saw evidence of this recently: the picture below is my son watering flowers.  Notice how he is holding the watering can:

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Teams are a vehicle for getting things done.  I love being a part of a team and am slowly learning how to lead effective teams.  One thing I’ve learned already is that the Team, as a vehicle, can sometimes get in the way.  In what follows, I’ll show how.

Quantifying Communication Breakdown

The size of a team has a direct relationship to level of effective communication — both miscommunication and lack of communication.  A more quantitative explanation is as follows:

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On May 25, I announced a contest whereby the readers of shmula could enter and win a Six Sigma for Dummies Workbook.  In the proceeding posts, I’ll be posting Craig Gygi’s responses to those questions.  Today are Craig’s comments on methods of achieving failure quicker on product or component testing and on developing supplier quality with your suppliers.

Some background first on the contest and to view the winners, please go here and Craig’s previous answers can be found here.

Below were the contest details:

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I discovered a helpful site today, where one of the questions on the FAQ was: "Will I be Kaizen-ed out of a job?"  It’s a fair question.

Below is the answer given by the site:

Will I be kaizen-ed out of a job?
The single most common fear that operators have when learning about kaizen and waste elimination is that they will loose their job after a kaizen event. After all, isn’t labor the first waste listed (see preceding question).

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On May 25, I announced a contest whereby the readers of shmula could enter and win a Six Sigma for Dummies Workbook.  In the proceeding posts, I’ll be posting Craig Cygi’s responses to those questions.  Today are Craig’s response to the question on the Process Capability Index (C_pk) as a measurement for Process Capability, thoughts on introducing Lean and Six Sigma into an organization, and some comments around the recent cynicism toward Six Sigma.

Some background first on the contest and to view the winners, please go here:

Below were the contest details:

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On May 25, I announced a contest whereby the readers of shmula could enter and win a Six Sigma for Dummies Workbook.

Below were the contest details:

Submit your Six Sigma questions and enter a chance to win Six Sigma Workbook For Dummies, an industry bestseller since its publication in 2005.  We are fortunate to have Craig Gygi, the lead author of Six Sigma for Dummies and the companion Six Sigma Workbook For Dummies to answer reader’s questions for this raffle.

To enter,

1. Submit your question for Craig in the comments of this post.

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This post is a republication of an interview I held with Mary Poppendieck, the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback) and Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback). 

In August of 2006, I invited the readers of shmula to pose questions to Mary Poppendieck, the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback), which won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004 and, the sequel Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback) which will be available in early September 2006. For this interview, 12 Questions were submitted and Mary was gracious enough to answer them — the reader’s Questions and Mary’s responses are below.  

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