Occasionally, we are put in the position of removing an employee; that is, we must fire them. In many cases, we will not have enough documentation to validate the ineptitude of such an employee. Furthermore, we may not have a standard algorithm (procedure) to follow when removing this individual. Many companies add the impediment of […]
We have never seen a meaningful employee evaluation system. The abominations are generally designed as a tool to assess the performance of the employee with respect to corporate goals. When they present the illusion of quantification, the values are really qualitative and they will inflate over time as people are ‘soft’ about providing ‘real’ assessment. […]
Ideally, the human resources function or department represents the employee to management and management to the employee. Sadly, in our experience, most human resources people are inclined to support the individuals who sign their paycheck and the employees are left swinging in the breeze. It is no wonder that employees will gravitate towards collective bargaining […]
Many raindrops make an ocean. We have seen a divisional vice-president sneer at a small cost reduction and tell us it was not Six Sigma material. We didn’t care, because permitting small cost reductions makes the practice part of the culture while still adding benefits to the firm. We have already shown in another blog […]
People in education often like to implement “programs.” In fact, we call this syndrome “program-itis” because it leads to inflammation of the budget. As with many corporation, we see people who want to improve a situation decide to follow “best practices” without verifying that these are, in fact, best practices. They can only be best […]
There is only one way to describe this scenario and that is via a story. Consider the organization that is coming to the end of the project. The product is a complicated subassembly that goes into a larger system and has numerous interactions and incarnations of the design. They are late in the delivery of […]
Risks can have origins in communications and are not the sole province of the stakeholders and sponsors of the project. Sometimes the organization damages itself via the structure. We are all familiar with the functional organization, often referred to as a line organization or stove pipe organization in which we group the company by discipline. […]
This blog post is born out of a response to the Named Risk post from Ed Arnold on www.LinkedIn.com. He left the reply below: In my experience, a lot of time/effort is wasted when project owners change. The knowledge gets lost, even if they leave their spreadsheets and power points behind. The answer: a collaborative […]
A modular FMEA is a modification of the standard Failure Mode and Effects Analysis tool into meaningful components. For example, we can select “stepper motor” as a component of a typical instrument cluster used in the dashboards of truck and autos. We would then create our FMEA to deal with all issues related specifically the […]
We have heard executive complain when an employee they put through external training left the company to pursue a better-paying job somewhere else. Our question has always been “Why didn’t you take care of your investment?” Training employees is an investment of time and money in much the same way as tilling and seeding the […]