Kanban Quotes

“Without slack there is no tactical agility in the business.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“An Economic Model for Lean W”
― 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

“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

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

“choose to use Kanban as a method to drive change in your organization, you are subscribing to the view that it is better to optimize what already exists, because that is easier and faster and will meet with less resistance than running a managed, engineered, named-change initiative. Introducing a radical change is harder than incrementally improving an existing one.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

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

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

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

“Asking people to change behavior is difficult!”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

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

“Why “one size fits all” development methodologies don’t work”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“Software engineers are apparently not supposed to have a social or family life.”
― 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

“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

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

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

“The physical board had a huge psychological effect compared to anything we got from the electronic tracking tool we used at Microsoft. By attending the standup each day, team members were exposed to a sort of time-lapse photography of the flow of work across the board. Blocked work items were marked with pink tickets, and the team became much more focused on issue resolution and maintaining flow. Productivity jumped dramatically.”
― 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