Quotes from David J. Anderson

You need slack to enable continuous improvement. In order to have slack, you must have an unbalanced value stream with a bottleneck resource. Optimizing for utilization is not desirable.

The two pillars of the Toyota production system are just-in-time and automation with a human touch, or autonomation.

Kanban, while Japanese, is less metaphorical than Drum-Buffer-Rope.

Of course, speed is most useful if it is in the correct direction;

Why "one size fits all" development methodologies don't work

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a "sustainable pace"? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change?

Reducing coordination and transaction costs is at the heart of Lean. It is waste elimination in its most potent form. It allows smaller batches to become efficient. It enables business agility. Reducing coordination and transaction costs is game changing.

you don't need the best people to produce world-class results.

lower tacit-knowledge depreciation when we have less work-in-progress, resulting in higher quality.

An interesting side effect of pull systems is that they limit work-in-progress (WIP) to some agreed-upon quantity

Software engineers are apparently not supposed to have a social or family life.

Decide the outer boundaries of the kanban system. It is often best to limit this to the immediate span of political control. Do not force visualization, transparency, and WIP limits on any department that does not volunteer to collaborate.

An Economic Model for Lean W

Asking people to change behavior is difficult!

Developing an increased level of trust with other teams can enable the harder things.

Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management. It requires that some process is already in place so that Kanban can be applied to incrementally change the underlying process.

When teams are asked to work together to analyze problems and design solutions, the quality is higher.

Elementary school children are very impressionable

Prioritization is rightly the job of the business sector, not the technology organization, and so should not be within a technical manager's remit. Unfortunately, it is commonplace for business management to abdicate that responsibility and leave a technical manager to prioritize the work—and

how do you identify wasteful transaction costs or coordination activities? I believe that you ask yourself, "If this activity is truly value-adding, would we do more of it?" When

When we agree to meet with friends, have drinks, dinner, and watch a movie on a Friday evening, we incur coordination costs. All the emails, text messages, and phone calls that are required to arrange a social evening are the coordination costs. So

It appears evident that, for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality.

Donald Wheeler and Donald Reinertsen on variability and queuing;

Predictability builds and holds trust, a core Agile value, better than does delivering more with less reliability.