Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart (Jossey Bass Business and Management Series): Geary A. Rummler, Alan P. Brache

• Filed under: Business

Editorial Reviews

Streamline the processes vital to optimum performance

With over 100,000 copies sold worldwide, Improving Performance is recognized as the book that launched the Process Improvement revolution. It was the first such approach to bridge the gap between organization strategy and the individual. Now, in this revised and expanded new edition, Rummler and Brache reflect on the key needs of organizations faced with today’s challenge of managing change. With multiple charts, checklists, hands-on tools and case studies, the authors show how they implemented their Performance Improvement methodology in over 250 successful projects with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Shell Oil, and Citibank.

From the Inside Flap
With over 100,000 copies sold worldwide, Improving Performance is recognized as the book that launched the Process Improvement revolution. It was the first such approach to bridge the gap between organization strategy and the individual. Now, in this revised and expanded new edition, Rummler and Brache reflect on the key needs of organizations faced with today’s challenge of managing change. With multiple charts, checklists, hands-on tools and case studies, the authors show how they implemented their Performance Improvement methodology in over 250 successful projects with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Shell Oil, and Citibank.

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Flowcharts: Plain & Simple: Learning & Application Guide: Joiner Associates Staff

• Filed under: Business

Editorial Reviews

Flowcharts teaches how to create and compare different flowcharts that outline the sequence of steps in a process. The information is presented in a straightforward, easy-to-understand manner through a series of exercises and case studies. Users of Plain & Simple Series learn how to select the right tool for the task at hand, collect the right data, interpret the data, and take appropriate action based on their findings.

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Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works (2nd Edition) (VOICES): Kelly Goto, Emily Cotler

• Filed under: Business

Editorial Reviews

Anyone who has managed the process of developing or redesigning a Web site of significant size has likely learned the hard way the complexities, pitfalls, and cost risk of such an undertaking. While many Web development firms have fantastic technical expertise, what sets the topnotch organizations apart is the ability to accurately manage the planning and development process. Web Redesign: Workflow That Works directly addresses this crucial area with a specific, proven process.

This brief but important book lays out a specific five-step strategy–called the Core Process–that can always be applied to the development of Web sites and fine-tuned to almost any type of project. Each step–defining the project, developing site structure, visual design and testing, production and QA, and launch and beyond–contains three related but distinct tracks. The text begins with a brief overview of each of the steps, then delves deeper into each with detailed explanations as well as specific forms and project-management strategies. This book does not cover back-end, server-side programming. Instead, it focuses primarily on the visual, conventional components of a Web site.

Authors Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler compiled this book in an attractive, easy-to-read format. This process guide uses numerous full-color screen shots to illustrate site examples, as well as plenty of site diagrams and sample forms. The book even has a companion Web site with downloadable forms in PDF format to put the Core Process into immediate action. –Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

• Step 1–Defining the Core Process: discovery, planning, and clarification;
• Step 2–Developing site structure: content-view, site-view, and page-view;
• Step 3–Visual design and testing: creating, confirming, and handing off;
• Step 4–Production and QA: prepping, building, and testing;
• Step 5–Launch and beyond: delivery, launch, and maintenance.

–This text refers to the

Paperback
edition.

Review
What a triumph this book is! Clear, comprehensive, gorgeous, and packed with insights I haven’t seen anywhere else. — Jim Heid, Thunderlizard Productions
–This text refers to the

Paperback
edition.

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Advanced Facilitation Strategies: Tools & Techniques to Master Difficult Situations: Ingrid Bens

• Filed under: Business

Editorial Reviews

From Ingrid Bens, the author of the best-selling book Facilitating with Ease!, comes the next-step resource for project leaders, managers, community leaders, teachers, and other facilitators who want to hone their skills in order to deal with complex situations. Advanced Facilitation Strategies is a field guide that offers practical strategies and techniques for working with challenging everyday situations. These proven strategies and techniques are based on experience gleaned from hundreds of facilitated activities in organizations of all sizes and in all sectors.

Both novice and seasoned facilitators who have had firsthand experience designing and leading meetings will benefit from this reality-based playbook. Advanced Facilitation Strategies is filled with the information facilitators need to

• Become better at diagnosing facilitation assignments and creating effective process designs
• Broaden their repertoire of tools to make impromptu design changes whenever they are needed
• Learn to be more resilient and confident when dealing with dysfunctional situations and difficult people.

From the Back Cover
Advanced Facilitation Strategies

From Ingrid Bens, the author of the best-selling book Facilitating with Ease!, comes the next-step resource for project leaders, managers, community leaders, teachers, and other facilitators who want to hone their skills in order to deal with complex situations. Advanced Facilitation Strategies is a field guide that offers practical strategies and techniques for working with challenging everyday situations. These proven strategies and techniques are based on experience gleaned from hundreds of facilitated activities in organizations of all sizes and in all sectors.

Both novice and seasoned facilitators who have had firsthand experience designing and leading meetings will benefit from this reality-based playbook. Advanced Facilitation Strategies is filled with the information facilitators need to

• Become better at diagnosing facilitation assignments and creating effective process designs
• Broaden their repertoire of tools to make impromptu design changes whenever they are needed
• Learn to be more resilient and confident when dealing with dysfunctional situations and difficult people

This book includes techniques for dealing with dilemmas in facilitation, shows how to maintain neutrality in various situations, and reveals how to work effectively with group leaders. Bens outlines six common decision quandaries and offers tips on how advanced facilitators resolve them. She suggests various tools that can be used to intervene in group conflicts in order to put participants back on track. The author also outlines five steps for managing complex situations—assessment, design, contracting, implementation, and follow-up—and shows how to implement each step to maximize effectiveness.

Advanced Facilitation Strategies, with an accompanying CD-Rom, is a valuable toolkit filled with customizable instruments, charts, tools, checklists, references, and guides for all practitioners.

Praise for Ingrid Bens’s Facilitating with Ease!

“Facilitating with Ease! is a gold mine of tools, tips, and wisdom, useful for both novices and experts. In a world where everyone must facilitate or fall behind, this guide will help you stay ahead!”
–Jim Gannon, senior vice president of human resources development, Royal Bank Financial Group

“Facilitating with Ease! is a must-have resource. I’ve been in OD for fifteen years and this is one of my ‘go-to’ books.”
–Rob Mullins, senior training consultant, The Boeing Company

“Facilitating with Ease! is so thorough and so well organized, we’ve made it the centerpiece of our facilitator training program.”
–Karen H. Wunderlin, president, Wunderlin Consulting

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The Enterprise and Scrum: Ken Schwaber

• Filed under: Business

Editorial Reviews

Get the practical guidance you need to apply Scrum enterprise wide–straight from a leader and innovator in the agile process movement. Agile development methods, such as Scrum, have been shown to produce improvements in speed, quality, and cost. However, the practices within Scrum, such as self-managing teams, are often so different from the norm at most enterprises and cause an organizational reaction. The productivity and quality benefits of Scrum pose a compelling reason to make such changes–moving it from the small team to the enterprise level. And as Scrum crosses to the mainstream, executives need to know how to manage the necessary change processes. In addition, managers and employees alike want to know what the change means to them, personally. With case studies and pragmatic approaches, this book shows development managers and developers how to extend Scrum from one or two projects within an engineering organization to the larger enterprise. It also addresses the questions that newcomers have regarding process, interaction, reports, habits, tradeoffs, and more.

From the Publisher
Key Book Benefits:

-Delivers best practices from an author with more than 20 years of experience with agile development methods

-Provides guidance about both system and interpersonal processes

-Features numerous case studies about Scrum adoption at large enterprises–including Microsoft® Corporation

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Build Your Customer Strategy: A Guide to Creating Profitable Customer Relationships: James G. Barnes

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

“The customer relationships that a company is able to cultivate represent the most important asset that will never appear on its balance sheet.”
-From Chapter 1 of Build Your Customer Strategy

Build Your Customer Strategy: A Guide to Creating Profitable Customer Relationships spells out how to create profitable and lasting customer relationships. It demystifies creating the great customer experience-something that everyone seems to be talking about these days-by showing you how to approach “experience” in ways your competitors haven’t even thought of.

Praise for Build Your Customer Strategy: A Guide to Creating Profitable Customer Relationships

“Jim Barnes has written a down-to-earth, highly readable book that takes you through real examples with concrete ideas you can use today. Fact is, customers are the only source of revenue, and Jim will help your company build the strategy to grow the value of each customer to your firm, by making sure your firm becomes more valuable to each customer.”
-Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, PhD coauthors, The One to One Future and Return on Customer

“Jim Barnes is in a class by himself as a guru who truly understands customer relationships from the customer’s point of view. Read Build Your Customer Strategy when you’re ready to move past slogans and technology-based CRM projects to create real customer equity and long-term profitability.”
-Bob Thompson, CEO CustomerThink Corp., and founder, CRMGuru.com

“Build Your Customer Strategy is the book for leaders committed to creating genuine connections with clients. Jim goes beyond conventional thinking to help businesses understand, create, and implement a strategy that will result in the type of long-term loyal customers everyone wants-the ones who bring their family and friends.”
-Anne Lockie, Executive Vice President, Sales Canadian Personal and Business Clients, RBC Royal Bank

“Excellent reading. Jim Barnes brings a refreshing perspective to customer service, loyalty and the importance of long-term, sustainable client relationships. Insightful and very educational.”
-Stephen Foster, Senior Vice President, Operations Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.

From the Inside Flap
Goods and services are no longer enough.Today’s customers attach an emotional connection to the products they use and to the businesses at which they shop. Wouldn’t you love to have your customers raving about your company or about your product and calling it their own? Now you can.

With his profound insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense, industry expert and author Jim Barnes shows you how managers and executives can create lasting and genuine customer relationships that will withstand the competitive overtures of other companies. He draws on his more than thirty years of experience listening to end-consumers and business customers from a wide variety of industries to enable you to develop your own customer strategy, using the building blocks of successful customer relationships that are presented in this book.

Filled with case histories of companies that have succeeded in building solid, genuine relationships with customers, this book will help you to maximize and capitalize on the opportunities your customers represent. This hands-on book:

• Explores the process of developing and sustaining customer relationships that establish an emotional connection
• Explains how to achieve the lofty status where customers will actually be proud to be your customers
• Considers how to manage difficult relationships, such as those that take place via technology or at great distances
• Helps you take the pulse of your customer relationships and identify where those relationships are weak and where they are strong

Required reading for every CEO, chief customer officer, customer service executive, and marketing executive, this book urges you to adopt—and keep in mind—the customer’s perspective and what it means as a customer to have a relationship with a company or brand. Build Your Customer Strategy shows you how to make a connection with your customers that will not simply satisfy them, but also build and keep their loyalty for your business’s long-term success.

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Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development: Alec Sharp, Patrick McDermott

• Filed under: Recommended

Efficient workflow throughout an organization is of vital importance in today’s competitive marketplace. This hands-on book teaches you how to visually model the current workflow process to show where redesign will provide the greatest improvement. Bringing together the two disciplines of management and information technology, the methodology involves framing and identifying the business process, modeling and understanding the current process, designing and assessing improvements to the workflow process, and developing use case scenarios by describing the interactions between process workers and the system. Real-world examples, clear summaries, and project checklists are included to make this text a practical on-the-job guide for everyday use.

About the Author
Alec Sharp is the founder and senior consultant of Clariteq System Consulting, Ltd. in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is a founding member and past-president of the British Columbia DAMA (Data Administration Management Association) chapter. Patrick McDermott is president of McDermott Computer Decisions, Inc., in Oakland, California. He received his B.A. in Economics from California State University at Sacramento. He has served as director of the Data Management Association (DAMA).
–This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.

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Competitive Strategy Dynamics: Kim Warren

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

Review
“…many valuable ideas…” (Long Range Planning, Vol 37 2004)

This book offers a practical, fact-based approach to explain how enterprises deliver performance over time. Rigorous methods explain how to quantify the growth, decline and interdependence within the organisation’s resources and capabilities as well as the continuous interactions with competitors and other external factors. These methods create clear and practical pictures of the strategic architecture driving earnings and other performance outcomes, not just for commercial firms, but for non-profit cases too. Management is then well-equipped to answer three crucial questions in their strategy development : why has the business performed as it has to date? where is performance headed in the future if we carry on as now? and how can we alter this future for the better? The book provides the basis for an entire course on the time-based perspective on competitive strategy, connecting strongly to established static frameworks. Alternatively it offers a vital missing component for existing courses in strategy and general management, as well as a key reference text for professionals in corporate development, consulting and business analysis.

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Business Process Mapping: Improving Customer Satisfaction: J. Mike Jacka, Paulette J. Keller

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

A holistic approach to harnessing a company’s processes to achieve true customer satisfaction
Every move that a corporation makes is a mixture of input, action, and output-in short, a process. To keep customers, employees, and shareholders happy, corporate management must juggle conflicting priorities. These competing priorities result in conflicting processes. To help achieve true customer satisfaction, manage-ment needs tools that allow for a holistic approach to analyzing these processes. This book provides that tool. It shows corporations how to analyze and enhance their critical processes in order to deliver the highest level of service to their internal and external customers. Providing a clear understanding of what process mapping can do for a company as well as practical applications for each step in process mapping, this useful guide outlines a proven method for assuring better processes and building a more customer-focused company.

From the Inside Flap
Business Process Mapping is a powerful tool that offers a solid understanding of any given process, finds effective ways for that process to be more successful, and ensures that true value is being provided to customers. It allows all the individuals involved in a process to gain a better understanding of that process with a simple, yet powerful approach that anyone can utilize–from management to internal auditor to external consultant. Process Mapping is a holistic approach that includes the added benefit of increased employee ownership of ideas and, therefore, increased company morale.

Business Process Mapping represents a full, prac-tical discussion of this new tool. It provides the reader a fuller understanding of what processes are, then provides practical applications for each step in Process Mapping. It discusses the com-plete cycle of business Process Mapping and links business objectives, risks, and measures of success to the processes being mapped. Also included are numerous case studies and a wide range of tools for better implementing Process Mapping. To help understand the various steps in the mapping process, a detailed example is introduced and used throughout the book.

The four major steps of Process Mapping are fully explained:
* Process identification–attaining a full understanding of all the steps of a process
* Information gathering–identifying objectives, risks, and key controls in a process
* Interviewing and mapping–understanding the point of view of individuals in the process and designing actual maps
* Analysis–utilizing tools and approaches to make the process run more effectively and efficiently

Included in the book are various specialized tools that include questionnaires, process analysis worksheets, hierarchy/owner maps, and the techniques to be used in developing effective process maps. Business Process Mapping is a simple and definitive guide to Process Mapping suitable for individuals at any management level.

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Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development: Alec Sharp, Patrick McDermott

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

Providing proven techniques for identifying, modeling, & redesigning business processes, & explaining how to implement workflow improvement, this book helps you define requirements for systems development or acquisition.

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