David Harris
Student at West Virginia University
dharris1@mix.wvu.edu

I am adding a few texts to help out for those who are interested in reading about this. I used to have an entire library of books on the topic, but they went with the job and now I only keep a few.

One of the better books is "Overcoming Organizational Defenses" by Chris Argyris at Harvard University. There are also a series of good dissertations run through the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and Development through the Industrial Engineering Department at West Virginia University on risk based management of large scale projects and risk based scheduling. Last time I heard they were developing software to schedule projects based on risk.

I will look for a good paper on the bathtub curve. There was an excellent one in either IEEE's primary journal or in the management SIG journal.

The observations on equilibrium contracts comes out of basic economics, however there have been psychologists who have been very successfully using this observation to transform groups. If you can find the marginal actors then you have found the point where leverage can be applied to change the whole system. Again, there is literature but when I went to get a PhD I gave up a wealth of written knowledge on shelves at my prior employer.

Finally, there is of course the wealth of writing that comes from W Edwards Deming and the quality movement that followed. In particular the structured programs like Six Sigma or the one at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute the Capability Maturity Model are more valuable as teaching tools than as programs. (I am sure they would strongly disagree). The reason I say that is that a good quality program has to be executable by management and most of these programs fail because the changes are too large for senior staff to manage. Such programs are supposed to change how managers manage not how workers work. By changing how managers manage, workers change their work. That is harder to do than it sounds. We behave as we do because we are satisfied and avoid contrary behaviors. If the behaviors are unsuccessful that does not mean we will change, it just means we have unsuccessful behaviors.

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