Quotes About Work

every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures.

One goal is that our tooling reinforces that Development and Operations not only have shared goals but have a common backlog of work, ideally stored in a common work system and using a shared vocabulary, so that work can be prioritized globally.

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

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.

In any system of work, the theoretical ideal is single-piece flow, which maximizes throughput and minimizes variance. You get there by continually reducing batch sizes.

outcomes are what matter—not the process, not controls, or, for that matter, what work you complete.

Show me a developer who isn't crashing production systems, and I'll show you one who can't fog a mirror. Or more likely, is on vacation.

You know, deployments are like final assembly in a manufacturing plant. Every flow of work goes through it, and you can't ship the product without it.

When I tell him, he looks disgusted. "We spend more money watering the lawns at the manufacturing plants every week! Dick is going to hear from me about this. If he's not willing to spend money, we may lose orders—even if your project is just insurance so we can collect on all the hard work my sales team does—it's a no-brainer!

A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents are shown in the same work systems as development work, it will be obvious when ongoing incidents should halt other work, especially when we have a kanban board.

Up-front analysis helps us identify the smallest possible piece of work that will usefully achieve a business outcome using

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

Innovation and learning occur at the edges, not the core. Problems must be solved on the front-lines, where daily work is performed by the world's foremost experts who confront those problems most often.

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

Microsoft, still has a culture that if a developer ever has a choice between working on a feature or developer productivity, they should always choose developer productivity.

She looks around at the entire floor. Over a hundred developers are typing away, working on their little piece of the system on their laptops. Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else's.

Improving flow through the technology value stream is essential to achieving DevOps outcomes. We do this by making work visible, limiting WIP, reducing batch sizes and the number of handoffs, continually identifying and evaluating our constraints, and eliminating hardships in our daily work.

20% on detailed planning (Their poor throughput and high lead times were misattributed to faulty estimation, and so, hoping to get a better answer, they were asked to estimate the work in greater detail.)

We increase flow by making work visible, by reducing batch sizes and intervals of work, and by building quality in, preventing defects from being passed to downstream work centers.

Just as important as throttling the release of work is managing the handoffs. The wait time for a given resource is the percentage that resource is busy, divided by the percentage that resource is idle. So, if a resource is fifty percent utilized, the wait time is 50/50, or 1 unit. If the resource is ninety percent utilized, the wait time is 90/10, or nine times longer. And if the resource is ninety-nine percent utilized?

I'm pretty sure we don't do any sort of analysis of capacity and demand before we accept work. Which means we're always scrambling, having to take shortcuts, which means more fragile applications in production.

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

preoccupied by work." I start to apologize, but she cuts me off.