From the monthly archives:

November 2007

Featuritis and the Customer Experience

by Pete Abilla November 18, 2007

The more I learn and practice ethnography and design-thinking, the more I notice subtle but incredibly frustrating experiences.  For example, I had a frustrating experience with a faucet that was in the hospital room where our adopted baby girl, Mylie, was born.  This faucet is an automated one — with a sensor.  So, whenever an [...]

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Bottlenecks and Fast Food

by Pete Abilla November 17, 2007

One of the key lessons in The Theory of Constraints is that the contraint or the bottleneck determines the throughput for the entire system.  This means, then, that if we optimize and improve a non-bottleneck, then those efforts have almost zero impact on the overall throughput of the system.  It is only when we improve [...]

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Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything!

by Pete Abilla November 11, 2007

In August 2006, Mary Poppendieck was nice enough to entertain questions from my readers on the topic of Lean for Software.  Some great questions were submitted and Mary answered them.  Well, she’s willing to do that again, so please submit your questions for Mary and she will answer some of those questions.  I will then [...]

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We’ve Adopted a Baby Girl

by Pete Abilla November 9, 2007

Our little baby girl was born yesterday.  Mylie is our 7th child and we brought her into our family through adoption.  For long-time shmula readers, you might remember that we just adopted Preston last year.  Yup, we did it again 1 year later, and we’re very, very happy. The last month has been a humbling [...]

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Aza Raskin on Cooperation & Fence Throwing

by Pete Abilla November 7, 2007
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Aza Raskin

Aza Raskin is the founder of Humanized, the son of Macintosh inventor, Jef Raskin, and an all-around good guy.  A few months ago, Aza Raskin agreed to answer several readers’ questions.   In today’s post, Aza Raskin tackles a reader’s question about Product Management, cooperations with other groups, throwing stuff over the fence, why large teams [...]

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Aza Raskin on Google Search Results

by Pete Abilla November 6, 2007
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Aza Raskin

In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized 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.  Several readers [...]

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Raising Dust, Vision, and Business Problems

by Pete Abilla November 6, 2007

In the Treatise on Principles Concerning Human Knowledge, published in 1685, George Berkeley said: We have first raised the dust, and then we complain that we cannot see.   Berkeley was describing something entirely different, but his comment is, I believe, an accurate indictment of most, or all, business problems that we face. Readers — thoughts?  [...]

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Root Cause, Genchi Genbutsu, & Design Thinking

by Pete Abilla November 3, 2007

One Pillar of the Toyota Production System is "Respect for the Human" or, more commonly known outside of Toyota as "Respect for People."  That Pillar has given rise to an approach to improvement that is uniquely Toyota’s and is starkly different than the Taylorist approach proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, which fails to see the [...]

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The Variability Tree

by Pete Abilla November 1, 2007
This entry is part 19 of 28 in the series queueing theory

All processes are subject to some variability.  More common explanations of variability describes variability as either Common-Cause or Special-Cause.  The former is easiest explained as expected variation within a process that is produced by the process itself.  The latter, on the hand, is variation that is produced by the process by is assignable to some [...]

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