Ceptara

Recently I attended a training session on "Running Effective Meetings". It was a nice refresher course and summarized a number of practices quite well. Below I've included some notes on creating an agenda that was included in the course. Running Effective Meetings Recipe for Creating an Agenda

Just finished "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable" by Patrick M. Lencioni [Book Link]. It's written in the same style as "The Goal" (Goldratt, Cox) [Book Link], i.e. a method taught in the form of a story.

Often we focus on quality when our impact is greatly diminished.  Trying to improve the quality of widget at the manufacturing phase is only marginally effective considering a large portion of defects are designed in.  This is also true for software and services,  If we were to consider quality in the upfront design or creation process our decisions would have a greater impact and cost a great deal less than discovering them further down the chain.  In this article, I describe the DFQ/QA/QC/CE model (Engineering Quality Cycle) which is used to build quality into the engineering process.

Just wanted to remind everyone that I have a talk coming up next week, February 19th, at the AmCon conference in Bellevue Washington - it's FREE, so don't pass up this opportunity to learn more about "Six Sigma in Purchasing" - more here including the presentation material. The talk focuses on presenting a number of Supplier Management practices and describing the quality tools that can be used to execute supplier management better.

On Friday, I will be delivering a talk on Kaizen Blitz for a Software Company in Bellevue, WA for the local Project Management Institute (PMI) chapter. You can find a copy of the presentation material here.

I had the opportunity to attend the MS BI conference in Seattle, May 9 - 11, 2007. The conference focused on the IT professional, not so much on the Business user.

The talk on Friday went well - everyone seemed engaged. There were a number of questions:

1) How do you make these type of efforts sustainable?

Ans: We all have suffered from the 'flavor of the month' program and are quite aware of the pitfalls that lie ahead of us in championing these types efforts. Some of the ways that were talked about include: