Quotes About Productivity

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.

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.

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.

The flow of work goes in one direction only: forward. Create a system of work in it that does that. Remember, the goal is single-piece flow.

However, we must remind everyone that improvement of daily work is more important than daily work itself, and that all teams must have dedicated capacity for this (e.g., reserving 20% of all cycles for improvement work, scheduling one day per week or one week per month, etc.). Without doing this, the productivity of the team will almost certainly grind to a halt under the weight of its own technical and process debt.

In addition to the human suffering that comes with the current way of working, the opportunity cost of the value that we could be creating is staggering—the authors believe that we are missing out on approximately $2.6 trillion of value creation per year, which is, at the time of this writing, equivalent to the annual economic output of France, the sixth-largest economy in the world.

Instead of IT Operations doing manual work that comes from work tickets, it enables developer productivity through APIs and self-serviced platforms that create environments, test and deploy code, monitor and display production telemetry, and so forth.

Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there's little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there's not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So,

high performers were twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals. And,

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.

However, interrupting technology workers is easy, because the consequences are invisible to almost everyone, even though the negative impact to productivity may be far greater than in manufacturing. For instance, an engineer assigned to multiple projects must switch between tasks, incurring all the costs of having to re-establish context, as well as cognitive rules and goals.

To have humans executing tests that should be automated is a waste of human potential.

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.

Step 2 is to exploit the constraint," he continues. "In other words, make sure that the constraint is not allowed to waste any time. Ever. It should never be waiting on any other resource for anything, and it should always be working on the highest priority commitment the IT Operations organization has made to the rest of the enterprise. Always.

Why Do DevOps? The competitive advantage this capability creates is enormous, enabling faster feature time to market, increased customer satisfaction, market share, employee productivity, and happiness, as well as allowing organizations to win in the marketplace. Why?

We're going way too slowly, with too much wip and too many features in flight. We need to make our releases smaller and shorter and deliver cash back faster, so we can beat the internal hurdle rate.

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.

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

technical debt' is what creates hardship, toil, and reduces the agility of our software engineers,

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.

Everyone around here thinks features are important, because they can see them in their app, on the web page, or in the API. But no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.