Quotes About Management

We can outsource the work but not the responsibility.

when projects are late, adding more developers not only decreases individual developer productivity but also decreases overall productivity.

As Sensei W. Edwards Deming once observed, 'a bad system will beat a good person every time.

The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.

How can we manage production if we don't know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are?

Mike Rother observed in Toyota Kata that in the absence of improvements, processes don't stay the same—due to chaos and entropy, processes actually degrade over time.

You just want a list of organizational commitments for our key resources, with a one-liner on what they're working on and how long it will take.

You probably don't even see when work is committed to your organization. And if you can't see it, you can't manage it—let alone organize it, sequence it, and have any assurance that your resources can complete it.

work in process' or 'inventory

Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management.

How can we manage production if we don't know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are? Suddenly, I'm kicking myself that I didn't ask these questions on my first day.

David J. Anderson's book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business; it's

I had called Erik briefly to tell him that I had discovered three of the four categories of work: business projects, internal projects, and changes

All the firefighting displaced all the planned work, both projects and changes

As part of the First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that it operates in.

Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote his seminal book, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, in 1984. It's a Socratic novel about Alex Rogo, a plant manager who must fix his cost and due date issues in ninety days, or his plant will be shut down.

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.

I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. How can we manage production if we don't know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are? Suddenly, I'm kicking myself that I didn't ask these questions on my first day.

What got worked on was based on who yelled the loudest or most often, who could engineer the best side deals with the expediters, or who could get the ear of the highest ranking executive.

Life in IT is pretty shitty when it's so misunderstood and mismanaged. It becomes thankless and frustrating as people realize that they are powerless to change the outcome, like an endlessly repeating horror movie. If that's not damaging to our self-worth as human beings, I don't know what is. That's got to change,

Before, I was merely worried that it Operations was under attack by Development, Information Security, Audit, and the business. Now, I'm starting to realize that my primary managers seem to be at war with each other, as well. What will it take for us to all get along?

There's a chain of command: gripes go up, not down.

When r&d capital is locked up as wip for more than a year, not returning cash back to the business, it becomes almost impossible to pay back the business,

three of the four categories of work: business projects, internal projects, and changes.