Quotes About Improvement

Mike Rother says that it almost doesn't matter what you improve, as long as you're improving something. Why? Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse, which ensures that there is no path to zero errors, zero work-related accidents, and zero loss.

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.

you pay down technical debt as a part of daily work. It's a magnificent example of the First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity in our code and organizations.

practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours.

A critical part of the Second Way is making wait times visible, so you know when your work spends days sitting in someone's queue—or worse, when work has to go backward, because it doesn't have all the parts or requires rework.

do we work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work?

The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. Reflect upon what the Toyota Andon cord teaches us about how we must elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself.

We all know we need to change how QA does testing, but the best place to start is by changing how Dev does testing.

Furthermore, integrating the objectives of QA and Operations into everyone's daily work reduces firefighting, hardship, and toil, while making people more productive and increasing joy in the work we do. We not only improve outcomes, but our organization is better able to win in the marketplace.

Amazingly, the transformations are not primarily based on automation. Instead, the incredible improvements come from modifying policies around the system of work and the policies that control work in process, ensuring that there are effective cross-functional teams, subordinating everything to the constraint, and managing handoffs well.

the %C/A can be obtained by asking downstream customers what percentage of the time they receive work that is 'usable as is,' meaning that they can do their work without having to correct the information that was provided, add missing information that should have been supplied, or clarify information that should have and could have been clearer.

By seeing problems as they occur and swarming them until effective countermeasures are in place, we continually shorten and amplify our feedback loops, a core tenet of virtually all modern process improvement methodologies. This maximizes the opportunities for our organization to learn and improve.

THE PROBLEM: SOMETHING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION MUST NEED IMPROVEMENT (OR YOU WOULDN'T BE READING THIS BOOK)

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.' The

We increase flow by making work visible, by reducing batch sizes and intervals of work, and by building quality in, preventing defects from being passed to downstream work centers. By

In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only one constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion." If

According to Lean, our most important customer is our next step downstream.

Instead of project teams where developers are reassigned and shuffled around after each release, never receiving feedback on their work, we keep teams intact so they can keep iterating and improving, using those leanings to better achieve their goals.

The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt.

Small batch sizes result in less WIP, faster lead times, faster detection of errors, and less rework.

One of the most important parts of any improvement initiative is to define a measurable goal with a clearly defined deadline, between six months and two years in the future. It

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.

integrating the objectives of QA and Operations into everyone's daily work reduces firefighting, hardship, and toil, while making people more productive and increasing joy in the work we do.

CONTINUALLY IDENTIFY AND ELEVATE OUR CONSTRAINTS To reduce lead times and increase throughput, we need to continually identify our system's constraints and improve its work capacity. In Beyond the Goal, Dr. Goldratt states, "In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only one constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.