Lean from the Trenches Quotes

“A great process isn’t designed; it is evolved. So, the important thing isn’t your process; the important thing is your process for improving your process.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Most people like change; they just don’t like to be changed.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Instead of asking “Why did we fail? Who screwed up?” ask “What did we learn, and what will we try next?”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Perfection is a direction, not a place! Having a clearly defined direction makes it easier to focus and evaluate your improvement efforts.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“As the organization becomes more Lean and Agile, the version control system usually needs to be evolved as well. So, keep an eye on this. Find out how long it takes to change one single line of code and get it into production. That may well be the most important metric in the project!”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Once we have estimated the number of features for each epic, we can count the total number of features and divide by our historic velocity of three to five features per week.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” —Yogi Berra”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“It turned out that size wasn’t the main factor influencing cycle time; other factors such as focus and access to key people were more important.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“this little note captures the essence of WIP limits: focus on finishing things rather than starting things!”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“It is very difficult not to implement a great process improvement proposal, but we realized that we have to limit the amount of simultaneous process improvement initiatives. If we don’t, we get too much confusion, which offsets the benefit of the process improvement.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“thumb sideways, or three fingers, is the consensus threshold. Any option that has that level of support (or higher) from every person in the workshop is good to go. Everybody doesn’t have to like that option, but everyone will accept and support it. That’s what consensus means. This type of consensus voting usually reveals the best option quite clearly.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Complex product development of this sort is a creative process done by creative people, and the most important currency is motivation. In this context, gut feel beats hard metrics. If something feels like an important problem, it most likely is an important problem, whether or not we have metrics to prove it.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“What is your feeling right now, using one word?” or “What is the most important thing you hope to get out of this meeting?”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“When doing process improvement workshops, I take care to move away all tables and create a ring of chairs in the center of the room near a whiteboard.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“This mind-set of motivating people to do evolutionary process improvement is the basis of both Agile and Lean.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“The strategy is pretty simple: it’s based on the assumption that people inherently want to succeed with their projects and that people inherently like to solve problems and improve their way of working. So, create an environment that enables and encourages these behaviors.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“If you do cause-effect analysis on your bugs, you’ll find that bugs aren’t really a problem; they are a symptom. Bugs in your product are a symptom of bugs in your process.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“If a bug is found, the first question is “Is this a blocker?” Blocker in this case means “The feature won’t be releasable with this bug” or “This bug is more important to fix than building additional features.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Anyway, remember to celebrate releases—even when you get good at it and they’re not as exciting anymore.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Demonstrated: The team has demonstrated this feature to the rest of the team, the on-site user, the requirements analyst, the system tester, and the usability expert. This helps us catch usability issues early so they don’t show up in system test or (even worse) user acceptance test.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Small means “Under perfect conditions this will take less than one week of elapsed time to get to ‘Ready For Acceptance Test.’” Perfect conditions means that we have exactly the right people working only on this feature with no disruptions. Medium means one to two weeks (again, under perfect conditions). Large means more than two weeks. Large features have to be broken down further before they are allowed into development.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“The “Ready for Development” column essentially means “Here’s a bunch of features that we’ve broken down and estimated and clarified, but we haven’t yet decided which of these we are going to develop and in which order.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“continuous reality check is a very simple and useful technique to detect and avoid death marches (projects where everyone knows they’re going to fail but still keep marching dutifully).”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“we reevaluate the goal and discuss what needs to change to improve our confidence. These are typical actions: Remove an impediment (“Let’s buy a new build server to replace the broken one!”) Help a bottleneck (“Let’s all do testing today!”) Reduce scope (“If we remove feature X from this release, we can still reach the goal!”) Adjust the goal (“This goal is no longer realistic; let’s define a new goal that we actually believe in!”) Work harder (“Who can come in on Saturday?”)”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“managers think that everyone knows the high-level goal, and then it turns out that each person has a different answer when we ask them what that goal is.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“We want to optimize the flow; therefore, we don’t want to fill up the board. We all know what happens to a traffic system when it is 100 percent full—the traffic system slows to a halt.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“We need space, or slack, to absorb variation and enable fast flow.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“the project board contains feature cards, and each feature team has their own board with the features they are working on plus the associated task breakdown.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“Ideally, each increment should independently add value to the users and knowledge to the teams.”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” —Yogi Berra In”
― Henrik Kniberg, Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban