Some recommended books

About 15 years ago I was involved with the world of Total Quality Management. As Quality & Technical Director at software house Praxis, I found myself sitting at the same table as the Quality Directors of BT, ICL, and three other major companies who founded the UK arm of the European Foundation for Quality Management. I soon came to discover the logic and power in the work of W Edwards Deming and had the privilege of hearing him talk. If you haven’t read ‘Out of the crisis’ it’s the first book I recommend here. First published in 1982 it described in vivid terms what needed to be done to concentrate on quality first and foremost and how many of the ’standard’ management techniques were misguided and even counter-productive. With the increasing interest in ‘process’ over the last decade, his thinking has found new application.

Following the theme, in particular in manufacturing, Womack, Jones and Roos’s book ‘The machine that changed the world’ describes how Taiichi Ohno revolutionised the Toyota production lines in Japan again by breaking the mould in process design and management.

More recently, service industries, and especially government bureaucracies, have been given the treatment by John Seddon, firstly in ‘Freedom from command and control’ and most recently in ‘Systems thinking in the public sector’. I highly recommend the latter. Seddon would probably refer to me as a ‘tool head’, but I have been encouraged by the degree to which (I believe) Riva can be used to support the approach Seddon advocates and have been bringing a greater TQM bias into the method. In particular, he stresses the distinction between value demand and failure demand: a value demand is when you call to place an order; a failure demand is when you call to chase your order. You get more efficient not by improving the efficiency with which you handle people chasing orders but by reducing the level of or (better)removing that sort of failure demand altogether. Similarly, batching does not add value. All this ties in of course with the distinction in Riva between essential and designed units of work.

I’d welcome comments on this.

BPM Suites and RIVA

 Many vendors are now suggesting that there modelling tools, and close links to IT and project implementaion now mean that processes can be modelled and executed within there BPM suites aligning process and IT.

I was wondering where RIVA sits in realtion to BPM and vendor driven products that propose to encompass the full BPM lifecycle including process automation? (model, simulate, implement, execute, montior, optimise).

 What are your thoughts around this and where does RIVA fit in?