Deming's System of Profound Knowledge - IT Revolution

What is the book about?

This book covers the life of W. Edwards Deming who founded modern managerial statistics and contributed greatly to WWII production effort in the US and post-war recovery on Japanese manufacturing.

This book is not merely a biography; it intertwines Deming's life story with the evolution of management history, providing a comprehensive view of his impact.

As the book was published by IT revolution and written by the co-author of the DevOps Handbook, it talks in detail about how agile methodologies.

What I found useful?

It was truly insightful to see the lineage of how different managerial waves evolved in the past hundred years, how the different management methods succeeded each other (from Total Quality Management through Lean and then how the foundations permeated into Agile and later to DevOps). The author paints a great picture of the events and the people involved besides Deming.

The first half of the book talks about the evolution of modern manufacturing processes through the life of Deming, I feel this is the part of the book that was fairly novel. This part of the book also flows really, it could easily be a narration of a Netflix documentary.

The second half of the book turns to software development and mainly to the DevOps 'movement', this part is definitely insightful, draws on several interesting case studies especially in the IT Security area. (e.g. white hat vs. black hat hackers).

Who would I recommend it to?

Certainly an interesting read (listen) to those interested in management history and the ideological background of the current software delivery practices.

If you are new to this sort of literature and domain (e.g. manufacturing, lean, software development practices), this may not be an ideal starting point as it talks about concepts fairly briefly assuming that readers are already familiar with them - which is what you would expect from the typical reader (listener) of this book.

Follow-on

For further reading, deep-dive, it'd be interesting to read first-hand from Dr. Deming: "The culmination of his knowledge" was compiled into what is called "System of Profound Knowledge" along with this famous "14 Points for Management"

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Dr. Deming's 14 Points for Management - The W. Edwards Deming Institute

The Deming System of Profound Knowledge® (SoPK) - The W. Edwards Deming Institute