Quotes About Improvement

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.

any improvement not made at the constraint is just an illusion, yes?

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.

Another benefit of having Development and Operations using a shared tool is a unified backlog, where everyone prioritizes improvement projects from a global perspective, selecting

when something does go wrong, we conduct blameless post-mortems, not to punish anyone, but to better understand what caused the accident and how to prevent it. This

We're putting in checklists everywhere, especially when we do handoffs within the team. It's really making a difference. Error rates are way down.

The principles of Flow, which accelerate the delivery of work from Development to Operations to our customers The principles of Feedback, which enable us to create ever safer systems of work The principles of Continual Learning and Experimentation foster a high-trust culture and a scientific approach to organizational improvement risk-taking as part of our daily work

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.

Having developers share responsibility for the quality of the systems they build not only improves outcomes but also accelerates learning.

The Phoenix Project is ultimately a book about transformation, and so it is incredibly gratifying to see it being used as an instrument to create transformations in real life as well.

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

The First Ideal—Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal—Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal—Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal—Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal—Customer Focus

Dan Milstein, one of the principal engineers at Hubspot, writes that he begins all blameless post-mortem meetings by saying, "We're trying to prepare for a future where we're as stupid as we are today." In other words, it is not acceptable to have a countermeasure to merely "be more careful" or "be less stupid"— instead, we must design real countermeasures to prevent these errors from happening again.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.' The Third Way is all about ensuring that we're continually putting tension into the system, so that we're continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

Mike Rother observed in Toyota Kata that in the absence of improvements, processes don't stay the same—due to chaos and entropy, processes actually degrade over time.

Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours.

Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote his seminal book, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, in 1984. It's a Socratic novel about Alex Rogo, a plant manager who must fix his cost and due date issues in ninety days, or his plant will be shut down.

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.

the Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. It is the dynamic that allows us to change and improve how we work, informed by learning. As Sensei Dr. Steven Spear said, 'It is ignorance that is the mother of all problems, and the only thing that can overcome it is learning.

This fast and frequent feedback is such a big part of achieving the Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy. And all of this was enabled by properly elevating the improvement of daily work over daily work itself, as dictated by the Third Ideal.

The famous Andon cord is just one of their many tools that enable learning. When anyone encounters a problem, everyone is expected to ask for help at any time, even if it means stopping the entire assembly line. And they are thanked for doing so, because it is an opportunity to improve daily work.

Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours. And if you want to create a genuine culture of improvement, you must create those habits.

achieving this greatness is never free. It requires focus and elevation of improvement of daily work, even over daily work itself. Without this ruthless focus, every simple system degrades over time, increasingly buried under a tundra of technical debt.

If we know it's that prone to crashing, why do we need to change it?