According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product.

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

* Starting from Need* Evolution of the Toyota Production System* Further Development* Genealogy of the Toyota Production System* The True Intention of the Ford System* Surviving the Low-Growth Period

Toyota production system : beyond large-scale production

A prevalent and pervasive view of designing is that it can be modeled using variables and decisions made about what values should be taken by these variables. The activity of designing is carried out with the expectation that the designed artifact will operate in the natural world and the social world. These worlds impose constraints on the variables and their values; so, design could be described as a goal-oriented, constrained, decision- making activity. However, design distinguish- es itself from other similarly described activities not only by its domain but also by additional necessary features. Designing involves exploration, exploring what variables might be appropriate. The process of explo- ration involves both goal variables and deci- sion variables. In addition, designing involves learning: Part of the exploration activity is learning about emerging features as a design proceeds. Finally, design activity occurs within two contexts: the context within which the designer operates and the context produced by the developing design itself. The designer’s perception of what the context is affects the implication of the context on the design. The context shifts as the designer’s perceptions change. Design activity can be now characterized as a goal-oriented, con- strained, decision-making, exploration, and learning activity that operates within a con- text that depends on the designer’s percep- tion of the context.

Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design

Effective production control systems are structured around the assignment as the unit of analysis. The quality of work assignments in production units such as construction crews and engineering squads is the key to production control and for determining production unit productivity. Research has revealed that the quality of assignments can be substantially improved by forming and selecting them to meet soundness, sequence, and size criteria. Quality assignments shield production units from work flow uncertainty, enabling those units to improve their own productivity, and also improve the productivity of the production units downstream. The associated reduction in task duration can shorten projects. Further reduction of project duration comes from shortening the buffers previously needed to accommodate flow uncertainty.

Shielding production: essential step in production control

Lean construction has at least two foci that distinguish it from traditional construction management. One focus is on waste and the reduction of waste. Breaking from the conversion process model, and reconceiving production processes in terms of Koskela’s flow process model (1) reveals the time and money wasted when materials and information are defective or idle. Instead of simply improving the efficiency of conversion processes, the task is extended to the management of flows between conversions. Consequently, in addition to its focus on waste, lean construction also focuses on managing flows, and to do so, puts management systems and processes into the spotlight along with production processes. Flow management is a much more difficult task on complex, fast track projects such as refineries, chemical plants, food processing plants, paper mills, etc. (2) These projects have long, complicated supply chains, many players, typically are under pressure to hit market windows for product, and are subject to multiple, extensive process design changes motivated by the opportunity to make much more money than is lost through disruption of construction. In this environment, traditional approaches to construction management fail miserably. The conversion process model conceals everything that needs to be revealed; particularly the design of systems and processes to manage work and work flow.

Implementing Lean Construction: Stabilizing Work Flow

Projects are temporary production systems. When those systems are structured to deliver the product while maximizing value and minimizing waste, they are said to be ‘lean’ projects. Lean project management differs from traditional project management not only in the goals it pursues, but also in the structure of its phases, the relationship between phases and the participants in each phase. This paper presents a model of lean project management and contrasts lean and traditional approaches. Four tools or interventions are presented as illustrations of lean concepts in action.

https://people.eecs.ku.edu/~saiedian/811/Papers/lean-proj-mgmt.pdf

Lean project management

Lean Project Delivery System emerged in 2000 from theoretical and practical investigations, and is in process of on-going development through experimentation in many parts of the world. In recent years, experiments have focused on the definition and design phase of projects, applying concepts and methods drawn from the Toyota Product Development System, most especially target costing and set based design. These have been adapted for use in the construction industry and integrated with computer modeling and relational forms of contract. Although by no means a finished work, the Lean Project Delivery System has developed sufficiently to warrant an updated description and presentation to industry and academia, incorporating processes and practices that have emerged since earlier publications.

The Lean Project Delivery System: An Update

Target costing is an effective management technique that has been used in manufacturing for decades to achieve cost predictability during new product development Adoption of this technique promises benefits for the construction industry as it struggles to raise the number of successful outcomes and certainty of project delivery in terms of cost, quality and time Target value design is a management approach that takes the best features of target costing and adapts them to the peculiarities of construction The concept of target value design is introduced based on the results of action research carried out on 12 construction projects in the USA It has been shown that systemic application of target value design leads to significant improvement of project performance—the final cost of projects was on average 15% less than market cost The construction industry already has approaches that have similarities with elements of the target value design process or use the same terminology, eg partnering and targ

/pdf/target-value-design-using-collaboration-and-a-lean-approach-347i659tyb.pdf

Glenn Ballard

Papers

Shielding production: essential step in production control

Implementing Lean Construction: Stabilizing Work Flow

Lean project management

The Lean Project Delivery System: An Update

Target value design: using collaboration and a lean approach to reduce construction cost