Yes, it makes a difference!

Quality Progress

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 83-87

  Nickols, Frederick W ^a  

^a EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COST EFFECTIVENESS; DECISION MAKING; MAINTENANCE; PERSONNEL TRAINING; PROBLEM SOLVING; PROCESS CONTROL; QUALITY CONTROL; SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS; TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT;

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT; REENGINEERING; SOLUTION ENGINEERING;

QUALITY ASSURANCE;

EID: 0029731841     PISSN: 0033524X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. The quality discussion list on the Internet was mentioned in the January 1995 issue of Quality Progress (Jim Clauson, "Cyberquality: Quality Resources on the Internet," p. 46). Anyone who has e-mail and who is interested in serious discussions of issues pertaining to quality and process performance improvement would be well served by subscribing to that list. The full name of the list is Quality: Total Quality Management (TQM) in Manufacturing and Service Industries. With e-mail access to the Internet, you can subscribe to the list by sending the message "subscribe quality" followed by your first name and last name to the address listserv@pucc.princeton.edu.
2. Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1973).
3. Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe, The Rational Manager (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965). This is undoubtedly the best known of the troubleshooting approaches applied to solving business problems. Millions of managers around the world have been trained in this rational, analytical approach.
4. The past two years have seen a spate of books on reengineering; however, the first two are perhaps the definitive statements: Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (New York, NY: Harper Business, 1993), and Thomas Davenport, Process Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
5. The past two years have seen a spate of books on reengineering; however, the first two are perhaps the definitive statements: Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (New York, NY: Harper Business, 1993), and Thomas Davenport, Process Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
6. Not a great deal has been written about the solution engineering approach. For one of the first treatments of a solution engineering approach to solving business problems, see Frederick Nickols, "Reengineering the Problem Solving Process," Performance Improvement Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1994.
7. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, Human Problem Solving (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
8. Chester Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). Anyone wishing to understand and appreciate problem solving in an organizational and business context is advised to read Barnard's classic. It was Barnard who drew the distinctions between effective and efficient solutions cited in this article.
9. Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987). This is an excellent treatment of the adaptive nature of action in the context of specific situations.