David J. Anderson > Quotes

“Without slack there is no tactical agility in the business.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“You need slack to enable continuous improvement. In order to have slack, you must have an unbalanced value stream with a bottleneck resource. Optimizing for utilization is not desirable.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“The two pillars of the Toyota production system are just-in-time and automation with a human touch, or autonomation.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“An Economic Model for Lean W”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“lower tacit-knowledge depreciation when we have less work-in-progress, resulting in higher quality.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Kanban, while Japanese, is less metaphorical than Drum-Buffer-Rope.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“An interesting side effect of pull systems is that they limit work-in-progress (WIP) to some agreed-upon quantity,”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Predictability builds and holds trust, a core Agile value, better than does delivering more with less reliability.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Of course, speed is most useful if it is in the correct direction;”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”?”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“When we agree to meet with friends, have drinks, dinner, and watch a movie on a Friday evening, we incur coordination costs. All the emails, text messages, and phone calls that are required to arrange a social evening are the coordination costs. So”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change?”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Developing an increased level of trust with other teams can enable the harder things.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“As the population of software developers ages, they care more about the rest of their lives. Many lament wasting their twenties locked up in an office slaving over a piece of code that failed to reach market expectations and became obsolete soon after release. Work/life”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Providing a good work/life balance will make your company a more attractive employer in your local market.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“It’s good business to provide a good work/life balance by never overloading your teams.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“if there is no explicit limit to work-in-progress and no signaling to pull new work through the system, it is not a kanban system.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Prioritization is rightly the job of the business sector, not the technology organization, and so should not be within a technical manager’s remit. Unfortunately, it is commonplace for business management to abdicate that responsibility and leave a technical manager to prioritize the work—and”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Donald Wheeler and Donald Reinertsen on variability and queuing;”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“When teams are asked to work together to analyze problems and design solutions, the quality is higher.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“how do you identify wasteful transaction costs or coordination activities? I believe that you ask yourself, “If this activity is truly value-adding, would we do more of it?” When”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“you don’t need the best people to produce world-class results.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Investors and senior managers all too often take the view that resources are fungible and easily replaced.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Kanban must not be thought of as a software development lifecycle process or a project-management process. Kanban is a change-management technique that requires making alterations to an existing process: changes such as adding work-in-progress limits to it. Work”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Reducing coordination and transaction costs is at the heart of Lean. It is waste elimination in its most potent form. It allows smaller batches to become efficient. It enables business agility. Reducing coordination and transaction costs is game changing.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“In general, software engineering teams and IT departments seemed to be at the mercy of other groups who would negotiate, cajole, intimidate, and overrule even the most defensible and objectively derived plans. Even plans based on thorough analysis and backed by years of historical data were vulnerable. Most teams, which had neither a thorough analysis method nor any historical data, were powerless at the hands of others who would push them to commit to unknown (and often completely unreasonable) deliverables.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management. It requires that some process is already in place so that Kanban can be applied to incrementally change the underlying process.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“You need slack to enable continuous improvement. You need to balance demand against throughput and limit the quantity of work-in-progress to enable slack.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban