Seeing the whole system, managing its complexity, and building quality in through disciplined improvement.
Clusters
Continuous improvement
- PDCA Cycle — plan, do, check, act as a universal improvement loop
- Deming’s Quality Philosophy — quality as a management system, not an inspection step
- Total Quality Management — organization-wide commitment to quality
- Lean — removing waste and creating flow
- Six Sigma — reducing variation with a data-driven improvement cycle
- Scrum — roles, events and artifacts of an agile framework
Seeing the process
- Business Process Mapping — drawing how work moves across people and steps
- Value Stream Mapping — finding waste along the flow of value
Systems engineering
- Systems Engineering — designing the whole, not just the parts
- Systems Engineering Process — life-cycle processes from the major handbooks
- Functional Flow Block Diagram — sequencing system functions
- Throughput and Timing Analysis — timing diagrams to predict capacity
- Software in Engineered Products — how requirements flow into software and what others miss
- Engineering Change Control — change orders and release processes
Complexity and systems thinking
- Complexity — simple, disorganized and organized complexity
- Wicked Problems — problems with no definitive formulation and no final solution
- Thinking in Systems — stocks, flows and feedback loops
- System Traps — recurring structures that produce problem behavior
- Leverage Points — places to intervene in a system, from weak to powerful
- Causal Loop Diagrams — drawing reinforcing and balancing loops
- Iceberg Model — events sit on patterns, structures and mental models
Variation, failure, and risk
- Statistics in Engineering — variation is the engineer’s real adversary
- Reliability — designing so the product keeps working in the field
- Design of Experiments — learning the most from the fewest tests
- Failure Mode and Effects Analysis — ranking how things can fail and what to do about it
- Risk Management — identify, assess, mitigate and track
How this map connects
- Upstream: Product Development Map
- Downstream: Operations and Supply Chain Map
- Home: GIEL Knowledge Vault