In the early days of CMMI® – SVC, around 4 years ago, I purchased this book on the recommendation of my colleague Chinmay Pradhan . The money and time spent with this book have been rewarding. I now strongly recommend it to anyone who asks me for a book to understand the services context for implementation of CMMI® for Services.
The book is designed as a comprehensive standard text for management students in service oriented industries.
It has been used as reference book for many years – the first edition is dated 1994. The book has been updated frequently and has survived almost 2 decades.
The book (5th Edition) has 3 parts and 17 Chapters.
The Chapters on “The Nature of Services” and “Service Strategy” (in Part 1) are especially useful to structure your approach to a service oriented organization.
There are interesting Chapters (in Part 2) dedicated to development of new services, service quality, and continuous improvement.
Part 3 titled Managing Service Operations has a lot of material devoted to demand forecasting, capacity management, managing queues, and service supply relationship – this section is useful for approaching the high maturity practices of the CMMI®.
Concepts are supported with diagrams, tables, examples and case studies from a wide range of service industries. The range is so vast that based on reading the book, it is easy to extend the concepts to a completely new service industry/ organization.
Each chapter ends with questions for the readers to work on (and consolidate their understanding of the concepts).
The book may not be suitable in a Kindle version (I think the big illustrations and tables in the book are not suitable currently for the Kindle format).
The print version (5th Edition) that I have is close to 600 pages – just slightly smaller than the A4 size – so it is pretty big to carry around.
If you belong to one the above category of folks, in addition to reading the book, you will find it useful to have a copy for reference on a more constant basis.
The book has multiple editions (the 8th edition seems to be the latest) and multiple versions/ configurations (hardcover/paperback, with student CD/ without student CD) – the price varies significantly based on the edition, versions and configurations. My review is based on a paperback copy of the 5th edition, without the student CD. If you are planning to purchase a copy, keep in mind that the price is dependent on some of the factors just discussed.
James A Fitzsimmons is a BSE in industrial engineering (Univ of Michigan), an MBA (Western Michigan Univ) and a PhD (UCLA). He has consulted several organizations, including large government bodies. He has edited and co-authored many books and journals.
Mona J Fitzsimmons is a graduate from the University of Michigan, did her graduate work in geology. She has been a teacher and an author. Her activities/ interests include wildlife rehabilitation, environmental issues and health care.
I had earlier read two engrossing books by Atul Gawande – Complications and Better. So when I saw The Checklist Manifesto while browsing in the neighborhood library, I decided to pick it up looking forward to an interesting read (some reviewers had strongly recommended it). The title also indicated that it may a good book to review for this weblog.
Over the years, many activities have become extremely complex.
Even experts struggle to master and remember all the tasks they have to perform.
Use of checklists can minimize human errors of oversight. In many cases this it can improve the performance significantly.
Use of checklists can also help the experts focus on the difficult, tricky parts of a situation, rather than worry about the mundane activities.
There is need to create better checklists, organize them for easy use and ensure that they are used.
The author uses examples from multiple industries and situations. The best ones are from hospitals and medical emergencies (Dr Gawande is a surgeon :-)). There are other examples from the airline industry (where pilots use checklists for normal as well as abnormal situations), construction industry, retail, and restaurants.
There is a whole chapter dedicated to research where the impact of the use of checklists in hospitals was studied. The research showed that there was a significant reduction in deaths (47% reduction) and major complications (36% reduction) for surgical patients. One interesting finding was that though only 80% of the hospital staff found the checklists useful, 93% of them said they would want a checklist to be used if they were themselves getting operated!
In trying to bring everything under the umbrella of “checklists”, the author dilutes the concept and utility of checklists as well as other equally important concepts of detailed planning, collaboration, empowerment, dedication, competence and focus. Maybe the title “The Process Manifesto” would have been more apt.
For people who are already convinced about the use of checklists, procedures, plans, collaboration meetings, etc., this book can provide you with interesting examples to relate to process skeptics in your organization. It can also provide process trainers with interesting case studies to relate to the class. You may also consider gifting this book to colleagues who resist the use of formal processes – the book is an easy read and is able to hold the reader’s attention reasonably well.
If you are looking for readymade checklists that will help you reach some level in CMMI®/ People CMM®, then this book is not for you :-).
Those who have read Gawande’s earlier books – Complications and Better may find The Checklist Manifesto a bit disappointing – it is not as engrossing as the earlier two. This is possibly because the earlier books focused primarily on hospitals, medicine and healthcare based scenarios, where Gawande has accumulated loads of experience. And in Checklist, he provides examples from other industries (aircraft manufacture, real estate, retail stores, restaurants, and so on) where he may not have had the same level of familiarity and insight.
I was scanning the shelves of a book lending library, when I came across this book – the title intrigued me, so I picked it up and browsed through it. Based on the title, I had imagined an extraordinary organization of one person (me!) – it turned out to be something else, but interesting enough :-). Anyway, I borrowed the book, read it, and here is the review.
In the last few years, retail customer experience has been highly customized by internet based enterprises (e.g., Amazon, Netflix, Dell) with a great degree of success.
Employee experience too can be customized, to provide an environment to motivate each employee to deliver his/ her best for the organization.
This is required because people’s expectations have changed due to their experience as customers, because other organizations are already doing it, because it enables higher employee retention, engagement and productivity, and because it increases the ability to attract high potential employees. “One size fits all” is no longer a desirable approach.
Customization has become feasible because of the variety of tools and technology that are increasingly available.
According to the book, workforce practices have evolved from chaotic, ad-hoc, person-specific, unstructured, unfair systems to something that is monolithic, over-controlled, one-size-fits-all, and over-standardized. And now it is time to make the systems more flexible, tailored and customized.
Segment the workforce on dimensions like geography, tenure, career level, role, age, etc. to understand the requirements and needs of different segments.
Offer modular choices, in areas like compensation, working hours, learning methods, working place, etc. The modularity ensures structure and equity while providing flexibility.
Define broad and simple rules, instead of defining very elaborate policies and procedures. This will permit flexibility while ensuring that the values of organization are adhered to.
Foster employee-defined personalization by making people aware and enabling managers to guide employees to make appropriate choices.
The book covers multiple areas of people practices that can be customized. Some of them are rewards and recognition, learning, work place, work time, career growth pace and choices, assignment mix, performance goal setting and feedback mechanisms, compensation mix, benefits, and work place tools/ technology.
The authors use examples from organizations like Best Buy, Microsoft, Accenture, Procter and Gamble, Deloitte, The Container Store, Royal Bank of Scotland and others.
As a reader, I found some of the examples (illustrating the concept of customization) as being trivial. For example, the authors use the fact that a multi-national organization provides company transport to employees in Hyderabad (while it does not do so elsewhere in the world) as an example of customization (geographical segmentation). To me, this is like saying that the company follows Indian labor laws in India :-). Since the organization has set up their office far away from the city’s residential areas and the city does not have adequate public transport, there is no choice for the company but to arrange transport for the employees.
The problem with trivial examples is that on reading the examples, many people will go, “yeah, we do that, actually we started that 10 years ago”. And miss the whole concept of the customization approach.
The book is easy to read and grasp and proposes a powerful concept worth investigating. Definitely worth reading for senior HR folks and CXOs (just ignore the trivial examples :-)).
How do the concepts covered in the book align with the People CMM®? Well, that is the subject of another post, some other day! :-).