Quotes About Efficiency

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.

Instead, code is only "done" when it has been fully tested and is operating in production as designed. (Note

should be as easy as writing one line of code to create a new metric that shows up in a common dashboard where everyone in the value stream can see it.

Even though I can't take the entire day off, I

By the 2000's, because of advances in technology and the adoption of Agile principles and practices, the time required to develop new functionality had dropped to weeks or months, but deploying into production would still require weeks or months, often with catastrophic outcomes.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. To do that, you need to know what matters to the achievement of the business objectives, whether it's projects, operations, strategy, compliance with laws and regulations, security, or whatever.

As has been proven time and again, the further the distance between the person doing the work (i.e., the change implementer) and the person deciding to do the work (i.e., the change authorizer), the worse the outcome.

By doing this, Development and Operations may end up creating a shared work queue, instead of each silo using a different one (e.g., Development uses JIRA while Operations uses ServiceNow). A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents

For Phoenix, it takes us three or four weeks for new developers to get builds running on their machine, because we've never assembled the complete list of the gazillion things you need installed in order for it to compile and run. But now all we have to do is check out the virtual machine that Brent and team built, and they're all ready to go.

One of the key lessons in Lean is that in order to shrink lead times and increase quality, we must strive to continually shrink batch sizes. The theoretical lower limit for batch size is single-piece flow, where each operation is performed one unit at a time.

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.

Then it hits me. The majority of our marketing projects can't be done without it. High touch marketing requires high tech. But if there's so many of us assigned to these Marketing projects, shouldn't they be coming to us?

When you spend all your time firefighting, there's little time or energy left for planning.

we value improvement of our daily work more than daily work itself.

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

As Damon Edwards observed, "Without these self-service Operations platforms, the cloud is just Expensive Hosting 2.0.

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

if we all want our developers to be productive, they need to be able to perform builds on Day One.

What that graph says is that 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.

handing me a Post-it note with all of Dick's contact information. Office location, phone numbers,

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?

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.