NOVACES, a leading consulting firm for healthcare IT performance improvement, will showcase its new book “Performance Improvement for Healthcare” at the 2012 HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas on Feb. 20-24. Recognized as one of the world’s largest conferences in the healthcare industry, HIMSS12 brings together global healthcare information technology (IT) and management [...]

During the mid-1980s, Lean, Six Sigma and Constraints Management (or Theory of Constraints) emerged as three schools of thought for organizations that were embracing Continuous Process Improvement (CPI). Until the late 1990s, these methodologies were like three different religions—coexisting, but completely independent of each other. However, since not every problem is a nail, a hammer [...]

Smith to drive Lean healthcare, Six Sigma and Constraints Management services to streamline flow, improve quality and safety, and eliminate constraints in healthcare processes. New Orleans, LA (PRWEB) January 27, 2012 — NOVACES, a leading management consulting firm that helps healthcare organizations implement performance improvement strategies, announced today that Deborah Smith, Ph.D. has taken the [...]

Breakthroughs in project performance can be achieved in these two ways: (1) Improve upon what you are currently doing; and (2) Change the rules by which you manage projects. The rules created as a result of the three biggest project management challenges have caused you to falsely limit your organization’s potential for excellence. By understanding [...]

Implementing a healthcare lean Six Sigma process and performance improvement program in your hospital will result in several surprising value-adding benefits. While these unexpected outcomes are by-products of the larger initiative objectives, they create just as much long-term value. Unexpected healthcare process and performance improvement training benefits: Increased visibility into otherwise unnoticed healthcare processes. Healthcare [...]

In Necessary But Not Sufficient, Dr. Eli Goldratt provided some guidelines to help us evaluate and leverage the introduction of a new technology. He reasoned that a new technology can bring new benefits if and only if it enables people to overcome one or more limitations of existing technologies. What is limiting major construction and [...]

In previous issues of this series, we explored healthcare performance improvement training, the link between quality and finance, and leadership engagement. If you have those things in place, it means you’ve done a lot of hard work to get where you are. At this point, it is common to try to dive in and solve [...]

If you’re like many people who have gone through a full-fledged Constraints Management Jonah training session to learn Theory of Constraints (TOC) Thinking Processes (TP), you may have come away feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the countless possible applications of all the tools in the suite.  Freshly minted Jonahs shouldn’t feel dissuaded if they don’t quite [...]

We’ve finally reached the last installment of Twelve Days of Constraints Management. A little late for the holidays but the website is back up and running and we now know what the security issue was with our site. A website virus will never stop us from getting the word out about the tremendous results that [...]

Wondering why we didn’t finish this series before Christmas? A website hacker infected our website with a virus! Reminds me of the isixsigma.com hacker who destroyed Michael Cyger’s great work and caused months of downtime. Luckily, we were able to restore the website within about a week through an archive system. We also strengthened the [...]