Coordinator: George Huling, Disciplined Software Consulting, g.huling@ieee.org

The Theory of Constraints, Constraints Management, Critical Chain, and Throughput Accounting are related issues. They have been around long enough that those in business management are sure to have some familiarity, even if only name recognition. On the other hand, the most important of the implementing processes, the Thinking Processes, are little discussed and even less well known. While Goldratt mentions one or another of the five processes in his latter books, there is nothing in print available from the Goldratt Institute. If one wishes to learn how to work the Thinking Processes, they must be trained at the Goldratt Institute; with one exception, a text written by H. William Dettmer and published by ASQC Press titled "Goldratt's Theory of Constraints; A Systems Approach to Continuous Improvement."

As a student and personal friend of Dettmer, I have advocated his book as one of the best written texts in process improvement. He has reduced and simplified Goldratt's methodology to something everyone can understand and apply. This Socratic cause/effect methodology is a powerful and compelling approach to problem solving in any area where some type of constraint is controlling reality. Starting with a Current Reality Tree (CRT) to determine the several root causes and prevalent core problem constraining the system, one gains knowledge of what needs to be changed. Using the Conflict Resolution Diagram (CRD or Evaporating Cloud) to unearth underlying assumptions leading to conflict, solutions and alternatives may be discovered and developed into a Future Reality Tree (FRT). This resolves the issue of what to change to. Finally, the question of how to implement the change is handled by the processes of constructing a Prerequisite Tree (PRT) and a Transition Tree (TT). In this presentation we describe each of the five elements and the Categories of Legitimate Reservation, those test elements which look into the logic of the cause/effect relationships.

Biography: By education, Dr. Novick is a Materials Scientist with degrees from the University of Arizona, MIT and Columbia. By vocation he is a technical manager with an MBA from Fordham and 40 years experience performing and managing fundamental and applied R&D, operations, sales and marketing. By preference he is a problem solver and facilitator of continuous process improvement; a profession he now pursues as a technical advisor on process improvement for The Boeing Company.

UCI Maps and Directions to meeting are available.

Next Meeting:

Date: Friday, June 26, 1998
Topic: Software Architecuture
Speakers: Richard N. Taylor, UC Irvine/IRUS, taylor@ics.uci.edu
                  David Rosenblum, UC Irvine/IRUS, dsr@ics.uci.edu
Coordinator: Debra A. Brodbeck, UC Irvine/IRUS, brodbeck@ics.uci.edu

The Irvine Research Unit in Software wishes to thank its corporate sponsors:

Sustaining:

The Boeing Company * Boeing North American, Inc. * Northrop Grumman Corporation
Raytheon Company * Sun Microsystems Laboratories * TRW

Supporting:

Beckman Instruments * Continuus Software Corporation * FileNet Corporation * Lockheed Martin * Printronix, Inc.

For further information on SPIN or IRUS,