Comments for Synesthesia

Comment on Links for 2013-02-22 by Julian

Julian — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:18:37 +0000

Test comment

Comment on DWP Process Failure by Julian

Julian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:15:54 +0000

In his February “Vanguard Newsletter“, [why no blog, John?] John Seddon says:

The DWP, who have been doing Radnor-style lean, have for some time been working on something called ‘tell us once’. If, for example, someone in your family has died, this ‘one call’ will be all you need to do. You may have noticed that ministers have often crowed about it as an example of better public services. Well, a reader sent me this, an account of one man’s experience of ‘tell us once’:

http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/archives/tag/john-seddon/

In his blog he asks what I might think of it. A classical example of money wasted on industrial (lean) design.

Which prompts me to ask, what is this flavour of “lean” that ignores customer quality? OK, more to research…..

Comment on Can paragogy help technology production? by Julian

Julian — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:01:56 +0000

Joe – thanks for your input.

From the limited sampling of the world made up of my direct observations, the technology conversations are easier to frame as learning:
- there tend to be concrete learning goals about finding out how something works and adapting or creating new
- teams working in agile ways are used to explicitly reviewing progress on a regular basis
- the same review and retrospective process easily and often covers reflection on the process
- team-based selection of kaizen activities can (perhaps) be mapped to peer-creation of learning goals

The area which perhaps needs more attention is the identification and framing of “requirements” – I have found it much harder to persuade business people to think of these not as immutable laws but as hypotheses about desirable system functionality…

Comment on Can paragogy help technology production? by Joe Corneli

Joe Corneli — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:34:50 +0000

An earlier related theory called “SECI” proposed a hard-coded learning cycle (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization) — which I’m guessing doesn’t work as cleanly as its proponents seem to imagine. As I see it, paragogy tends to be a bit of a messy affair, given the explicit acknowledgement of non-linearity in learning. To my mind, any benefits from a paragogical way of thinking would come out of improved understanding of how learning works.

Comment on Happy (belated) Tenth Birthday by Brad

Brad — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 05:11:54 +0000

I have to agree with the fact that a personal website is something that’s always nice to have, regardless if the majority of the content is aggregated or not. It’s still a great medium through which to express your interests, thoughts, etc – even if they are posted elsewhere on the web. And hey, 10 years is a heck of a milestone, especially for a website. Keep it up, chap.

Comment on Links Roundup by Synesthesia

Synesthesia — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:05:35 +0000

[...] where the only posts have been automated linklogs from delicious – as far as I can see I started doing that in January 2004, so the basics of lifestreaming are pretty old [...]

Comment on Why SLAs smell of waste by Derrick Bourgois

Derrick Bourgois — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:26:17 +0000

I believe a lot does depend on the implementation (or lack of) help desk service level agreements as Mark says. The supplier should adapt to the clients needs but both sides need to come together and compromise.

Issue fixing is always going to be based on failures – without these how do we know that there is a serious issue which needs immediate attention?

Comment on Why SLAs smell of waste by Julian

Julian — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:25:16 +0000

Interesting counter-view: are you seeing it from the supplier or customer’s perspective?

Comment on Why SLAs smell of waste by Mark Tomlinson

Mark Tomlinson — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:40:31 +0000

It seems to me that your experience and thus your recommendation is derived not from SLA’s inherently – but with dysfuntional implementation and management of SLA’s.

I think you will find more opportunities to help IT teams by coaching them on how to enable functional and positive service level management. But instead, your post suggests that we throw SLA’s out completely and hit the reset switch on that paradigm.

My feedback is 2-fold:

1). Massive changes are harder to adopt that small incremental changes. That’s gonna be a challenge for you proposal.

2). There’s a legal consideration for the majority is SLA’s which you would be naive to ignore or dismiss.

Try rearranging “The Wheel”, instead of reinventing it.

Comment on Can Kaizen be part of Standard Work – notes and observations by Joe Dager

Joe Dager — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:39:59 +0000

Thanks for posting this. Dr. Balle has some great thouyghts about Kaizen but has a way of simplifying most issues down to the individual. Thanks for the post.