Notes from the Book - Four Days with Dr Deming
I have recently finish reading the book Four Days with Dr. Deming: A Strategy for Modern Methods of Management (Engineering Process Improvement Series)
This book is designed to replicate the feeling that a CEO would have had attending one of Dr. Deming’s four day seminars. The book is a relatively quick read and is presented to appeal to multiple learning styles.
Some of the items that strike me as most important in applying Dr Deming’s principles are:
A) Quality needs to be top down to be truly effective.
Bottom up is ineffective. Even if the bottom tier is doing it’s assigned duties in a high quality fashion, they may still not be doing the right thing. It is an employees job to make sure that he “cuts down trees” in as efficient manner as possible. It is a leader’s job to make sure that the employee is in the right “forest.” The employee does not have the visibility to know if he is in the correct forest. This is especially true in software development. The cost of finding a defect increases exponentially the further away from it’s point of origin. If quality is not made a priority for the whole team and is relegated to a Quality Assurance group, the system will not function optimally.
B) Variation always exists.
The identification of “special causes” and “common” causes are key. Special causes can be fixed by the people implementing the process via such things as training. Common causes need to be fixed by changing the process. Until Fred Brook’s Silver Bullet
C) Systems with only common cause variation are said to be stable.
Stable systems can only change if the process changes. Attempting to provide further training to individuals will be ineffective.
