From the monthly archives:

June 2007

Humane Interface – Ask Aza Raskin Anything!

by Pete Abilla June 21, 2007
This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Aza Raskin

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 [...]

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Homegrown Ethnography

by Pete Abilla June 19, 2007

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 [...]

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When Bad Things Happen to Good Teams

by Pete Abilla June 15, 2007

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 [...]

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Accelerated Life Testing and Supplier Development

by Pete Abilla June 15, 2007

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 [...]

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Kaizen-ed Out of a Job

by Pete Abilla June 14, 2007

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 [...]

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Cpk, Process Capability, Workout, & Witch Hunts

by Pete Abilla June 14, 2007

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 (Cpk) as a measurement for Process Capability, thoughts [...]

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The Winning Dummies are . . .

by Pete Abilla June 13, 2007

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 [...]

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Lean for Software

by Pete Abilla June 9, 2007

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 [...]

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Complexity Creep

by Pete Abilla June 5, 2007

What if your company only had one product?  One feature in a product?  What would life in that world be like?  Then, as an excercise, slowly add one feature and one product at a time, and see how that world changes, which processes are added, and how complexity begins to accumulate.  Lean and Six Sigma [...]

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