Quotes About Management

How in the hell do you support and secure something that's written in Microsoft Access? When

While the redshirts battle to contain the raging engine fire that is threatening the entire ship, the bridge officers continue to cover their asses,

It stands to reason that if it is organized so that it can win, the business wins, too.

you definitely need to know about constraints because you need to increase flow. Right now, nothing is more important." Erik assumes a lecturing voice as he starts, "You say you learned about plant operations management when you were in business school. I hope as part of your curriculum, you read The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt. If you don't have a copy anymore, get another one.

Patty thinks for a moment, "It's strange. Even though we have so much data on projects, changes, and tickets, we've never organized and linked them all together this way before.

how we design our organization dictates how work is performed, and, therefore, the outcomes we achieve. Throughout

Incidentally, until you do this, no matter how many more Brents you hire, Brent will always remain your constraint. Anyone you hire will just end up standing around.

I expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it.

everyone needs idle time, or slack time. If no one has slack time, wip gets stuck in the system. Or more specifically, stuck in queues, just waiting.

four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.

Creating and prioritizing work inside a department is hard. Managing work among departments must be at least ten times more difficult.

We're on the hook for a huge number of projects. So, let's look at what our capacity is.

DevOps practices can be made compatible with ITIL process. However, to support the shorter lead times and higher deployment frequencies associated with DevOps, many areas of the ITIL processes become fully automated, solving many problems associated with the configuration and release management processes (e.g., keeping the configuration management database and definitive software libraries up to date).

If adopting DevOps could enable us, through better management and increased operational excellence, to halve that waste and redeploy that human potential into something that's five times the value (a modest proposal), we could create $2.6 trillion of value per year.

Ah… Now I see it. What can displace planned work? Unplanned work. Of course.

Unplanned work is not free. Quite the opposite. It's very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of Planned work.

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods.

Monitoring is so important that our monitoring systems need to be more available and scalable than the systems being monitored.

Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.

Remember, unplanned work kills your ability to do planned work, so you must always do whatever it takes to eradicate it. Murphy does exist, so you'll always have unplanned work, but it must be handled efficiently.

We need to focus on the riskiest changes," I continue. "The 80/20 rule likely applies here: Twenty percent of the changes pose eighty percent of the risk.

Traditional managers will often object to hiring engineers with generalist skill sets, arguing that they are more expensive and that 'I can hire two server administrators for every multi-skilled operations engineer.'" However, the business benefits of enabling faster flow are overwhelming. Furthermore, as Prugh notes, "[ I] nvesting in cross training is the right thing for [employees'] career growth, and makes everyone's work more fun.

You're right that you can't achieve the strategic until you've mastered the tactical,

the four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.