Quotes About Improvement

Whereas clarity and ingenuity are required for creating current and future state maps, focus and discipline are essential for successfully executing and sustaining improvement.

Following this scientific process assures that everyone involved in making improvements is thinking critically and breaking old habits of prematurely leaping to solutions or rushing through execution for the sake of meeting a deadline.

When we ask leaders and improvement professionals what the most difficult aspect to making change is, they nearly always say, "Sustaining.

We cannot empathize this enough: sustaining improvements begins with proper planning, followed by proper execution and management.

In mature continuous improvement organizations, value stream managers are sometimes given responsibility for profit and loss across the value stream

We're often asked how frequently a value stream should be improved. The answer is continuously. We understand that's a tall order for many organizations, but continuous improvement is your only way out of a culture of reactive firefighting, which prevents your organization from excelling on all levels.

the value stream map looks at the high level activities that transform a request into some sort of deliverable . . . the purpose of value stream mapping is to design a strategic improvement plan that will be executed over a period of time; it's not designed to address problems at a detailed level

The purpose of the second value stream walk is for the team to gain a deeper understanding about how the value stream currently performs and identify significant barriers to flow.

Freed capacity is the result of process time reduction through the elimination of wasteful activities and/or optimizing work.

designing the ability to operate with fewer customer complaints, less firefighting, and reduced interdepartmental tension brings tremendous hope to leaders and their staffs who may be feeling the pressure from an underperforming value stream.

Value stream improvement requires strong team-player mindsets and mapping team members who are comfortable designing for the greater good.

A common behavior is to feel compelled to start improving the value stream at the micro level and focus on reducing process time. .. redirect the team to help them stay focused on the macro and eliminate the easy-to-see waste within the value stream

The inclination to jump into the weeds and design micro-level improvements before the entire work system - the macro picture- is fully understood, is a key contributor to suboptimization.

Suboptimization occurs when you make an improvement to one component of a system while ignoring the effects of that change on the other components. A seemingly important improvement could cause the overall work system to perform more poorly.

My mother says we're supposed to make mistakes. That's the way we learn." Rocky Ryan in Bully At Ambush Corner.

Things won't get better unless you think better

Celebrate effort, not outcome

Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

If you can't say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you can.

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

That is why a house is not something that you passively 'have', it is something that you 'do', something that you 'work on'

Now think of life in the same terms. Start over when you have to. Make a second draft. Or a third. Embrace the chance you have to do things over again in a different, better, wiser way.

the idea of ever-growing output fits snugly with the widely used metaphor of progress being a movement forwards and upwards.

will definitely correct that in the future.