James McCuish
Roy Woodhead

Product: book
ISBN-10: 0-7277-3184-X
ISBN-13: 9780727731845
Publisher: Thomas Telford
Country:
Year: January 2003
Size: 15.24 x 22.86 x 1.27cm
Number of pages: 120
Weight: 272gr
Binding: paperback

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Product Description
A company's ability to quickly adapt to the changing demands and requirements of its customers has become an essential requirement for it’s long-term survival. Managers must not limit their thinking to 'just' the product or project's value but more importantly what will make customers prefer their offerings to those presented by rivals. It's about a 'Result Focus' aimed not simply at what is made and how much it will cost to manufacture but how it will be useful to those who buy it: it’s about exceeding the customer’s experience and so beating the competition. This significant new book explains how rational thinking is key to leadership and competitive advantage. The author’s combine the theories of value engineering and knowledge management with leadership techniques to provide a methodology that will help you develop the technological advantages that will deliver desired results. Achieving results: how to create value is not another book of tools and techniques for value engineering. Many such books already exist. Unfortunately, few of them explain the theories underlying the practice that they preach. Readers are expected to enter into a blind faith that accepts the ‘magic’ of value engineering without question or even evidence or understanding. Achieving results: how to create value is a book that puts the value of science back into value engineering. It moves value engineering from being a low-tech art to a hi-tech methodology capable of being used by the likes of the Drug Discovery processes, NASA’s Mars mission and in charity work. The authors focus on the underlying theories that link leadership, value engineering and technology management. It argues that the practice of value engineering has hardly moved forward in the last 30 years because the underlying theories upon which practice is based have rarely been critically examined or explained and that the subjective models upon which practice is based have been promoted at the expense of objective models –- this is what the authors seek to overthrow. Achieving results: how to create value provides a new foundation for value engineering, and will help its many advocates to see it as a method that enables the improvement of artificial constructs, from artefacts to organizations. It will help you to become a leader and a value technologist who thinks not just of product or project value but also of how this value will bring improvement to your customers and shareholders.

Professor Dan. A Seni, University of Quebec
»This is an important work directed at executives, middle line managers, project managers and anyone else familiar with Value Engineering and Value Management, concerned with the value creating process either in the public or the private sectors, and this for a numbeof reasons.

First it sets the the traditionally technical process of value design in the broder context of the organization.

Secondly, it deals with some of the important theoretical issues concerning the nature of value improvement from a technological point of view.

Thirdly, it pulls together the threads of a disparate literature around key concepts of value and function. Finally, it maps out with examples and cases, the intellectual process of VE and VM.

In sum, the book ought to be of particular interest to practitioners, researchers and students who seek a view of value improvement within a broader intellectual context.«

Professor John Kelly, Glasgow Caledonian University
This book sets itself the task of being not »one more procedure and tools« book on value engineering … but on being a challenging, thought provoking text concentrating on the theories of value engineering as a decision technology.

Its aim is to shift the focus from value engineering as a set of routine techniques into value engineering as a powerful thinking methodology.

In these objectives it succeeds taking the reader in a logical and thought provoking manner past the systematic and into the complex structures of perceptions and knowledge.

It is rare to sit and read a book at a single sitting but this is what I found myself doing being intrigued by the developing arguments and well-crafted points.

The author's state that the future for value engineering rests with the development of more rigorous approaches to thinking and decision taking, I believe that they have argued this point succinctly and convincingly.

Professor Steven Male, Leeds University
Roy Woodhead and James McCuish have broken the mold in writing about value engineering. By using analogies and case studies throughout to explain and inform they have provided the reader with an insight into using VE as a robust thinking methodology.

The concepts behind value engineering have been explained in full and they take the reader through the process, tools and techniques in an enlightening way, challenging practitioners, students and researchers of VE to look at the methodology in a different light. They argue that to continue developing, value engineering must go beyond a set of tool and techniques into a methodology that becomes a rational decision support system to support senior management.

I found the chapter on functional analysis particularly informative, and I look forward to debating the arguments raised in the book with the authors when we next meet. I am sure other readers will enjoy the book and will find it difficult to put down.

A »must« in a leader's library
In their book »Achieving Results, How to create Value,« Dr. Roy Woodhead and James McCuish bring the understanding and search for value by the producer and consumer to a higher intellectual plane by taking the reader deep into the principles and philosophies that influence decisions to improve value.

Woodhead and McCuish take the reader beyond the methodology to create value options. They stress that value creation requires more than presenting good value alternatives. Also required are good value decisions. Woodhead and McCuish build a compelling argument in support of a process that produces value based decisions, that support the development of best value options by dissecting and analyzing the decision making process. Of particular interest is using the Stage Gate process as a value-creating model.

Throughout the book the authors have demonstrated a unique ability to bring complex issues to an understandable level by presenting simple analogies one experiences in every day life.

As a value practitioner, I found the author's discussions of intrinsic and extrinsic functions and the principles and philosophies that form the foundation of function analysis and modeling, refreshing and thought provoking. I also find their description of the value practitioner in the role of facilitator reinforcing. The contributions to team performance by the facilitator are well defined as is the surrounding environment that influences the value practitioner's success.

Anyone interested in managing, engineering, or creating value for the purpose of value adding, or value improvement, must add »Achieving Result … « to his or her value management reference library

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hardback