Quotes About Efficiency

With the help of modern technology, I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, I tend to do blackout periods where I shut off email and Slack, so there's no way for people to get in touch with me. I put my phone in another room and that's how I get stuff done. - Matt Raible

Yes, I'm just a developer, so I try to find the simplest possible solutions. ... If you go to a bakery, the bakery isn't playing with five million different tools just because the old flour became too boring after a while. - Adam Bien

My theory: if the malls don't open until ten what's the point of being up earlier than that?

Emotions. A waste of energy in Zacharel's estimation. You lived, you warred and one day you died. Anything else was unnecessary.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent. Can everything really be that important?

Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.

until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it's merely WIP stuck in the system.

Remember, it goes beyond reducing WIP. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

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

In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.

By relentless and constant experimentation in their daily work, they were able to continually increase capacity, often without adding any new equipment or hiring more people.

It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end.

What use is it having all these offshore developers building features if we aren't getting to market any faster? We

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

What these organizations have in common is a high-trust culture that enables all departments to work together effectively, where all work is transparently prioritized and there is sufficient slack in the system to allow high-priority work to be completed quickly. This is, in part, enabled by automated self-service platforms that build quality into the products everyone is building.

In order to be able to know if we are making progress toward our goal, it's essential that everyone in the organization knows the current state of work. There

I say assertively, "Give me three lists. One that requires Brent work, one that increases Brent's throughput, and the last one is everything else. Identify the top projects on each list. Don't spend too much time ordering them—I don't want us spending days arguing. The most important list is the second one. We need to keep Brent's capacity up by reducing the amount of unplanned work that hits him.

They also knew that until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it's merely WIP stuck in the system.

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.

What use is it having all these offshore developers building features if we aren't getting to market any faster? We keep lengthening the deployment intervals, so that we can get more features deployed in each batch.