Author: Fang Zhou
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What Types of Waste Do You See?
Value is one of the fundamental concepts in Lean. When analyzing the process from a customer’s perspective, Lean practitioners separate value-added activities from non-value added ones, which are muda or waste. By relentlessly removing waste, Lean organizations are able to deliver value to their customers fast and at the lowest costs. Many people are familiar…
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Is Your Process in Control?
In 1980, the American Society for Quality (ASQ) republished Walter Shewhart’s seminal book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product as a 50th anniversary edition. In his Dedication to this commemorative issue, W. Edwards Deming wrote: “There was never before greater need for statistical methods in industry and in research.” I’d say the same today,…
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An Indispensable Competency in an Agile Organization
One of the most common reasons for project trouble or failure is an unsuitably large project scope. The problem is not necessarily unrealistic goals or inadequate resources. When the large scope extends the project timeline far into the future, it risks becoming irrelevant before meaningful impact is achieved. External circumstances simply change and invalidate the…
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Project Managers are Managers
Project management is often misunderstood. Despite recognition of its importance, many organizations have low project management maturity. Few have established proper project management governance, structure, processes, roles & responsibilities in the normal business operations. As a result, project managers have to navigate in an environment where project sponsors, teams, and other stakeholders have little experience…
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Setting SMART Goals
Recently I had conversations with several people on different occasions about effective goal setting. It is a common practice to use Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) as criteria to create goals. However, using SMART goals for effective management or decision making is not as simple as it appears. For example, “improve product ABC…
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Creating Better Strategies
What is your company’s strategy? As an employee or manager, what does it mean to you? Not many people I know can articulate it well. There seems to be much confusion between strategies and goals. Many strategies only state the desired outcomes without either 1) a meaningful connection to the organization’s unique ability to execute…
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Making Employee Training Effective
How often do you provide training to your teams? What kinds of training are most effective? As an employee, I was fortunate to receive various technical and managerial training throughout my career. The knowledge, skills, and experience I gained allowed me to grow continually. As a manager, I planned and sponsored training for my teams. …
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Lean: Impact on Organizations
I came across a few photos capturing the “before” stage of a Lean Lab initiative I led more than a dozen years ago. It was a valuable learning experience. Today, many opportunities still exist. Have you implemented Lean in an R&D or laboratory environment? What benefits did you see? While Lean implementation is often associated…
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Improving Business Processes
In today’s business, time is money. Speed can determine the success or failure of a product, program, or even a company. I have been involved in many business process improvement projects aimed at reducing cycle time, e.g. the time to register novel pharmaceuticals in emerging markets or the time to fully execute contracts required for…
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My First-hand Experience in Innovation
As I look forward to the new year, I learned that ProtoArray protein microarray by ThermoFisher Scientific would be discontinued at the end of 2018. ProtoArray is special to me because I spent the first six years of my industry career developing it from a concept from Mike Synder’s lab at Yale, to a global…