David J. Anderson Quotes & Sayings

Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist. — David J. Anderson

An interesting side effect of pull systems is that they limit work-in-progress (WIP) to some agreed-upon quantity, — David J. Anderson

Software engineers are apparently not supposed to have a social or family life. — David J. Anderson

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

Decide the outer boundaries of the kanban system. It is often best to limit this to the immediate span of political control. Do not force visualization, transparency, and WIP limits on any department that does not volunteer to collaborate. — David J. Anderson

Elementary school children are very impressionable — David J. Anderson

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

Developing an increased level of trust with other teams can enable the harder things. — David J. Anderson

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

you don't need the best people to produce world-class results. — David J. Anderson

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

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

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

Why "one size fits all" development methodologies don't work — David J. Anderson

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization. — David J. Anderson

I like solving problems, and science provides a logical way of solving real-life problems. — David J. Anderson

Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management. It requires that some process is already in place so that Kanban can be applied to incrementally change the underlying process. — David J. Anderson

Of course, speed is most useful if it is in the correct direction; — David J. Anderson

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

The industry is aging! — David J. Anderson

An Economic Model for Lean W — David J. Anderson

There are two things I enjoy most about my work. First, I get to work with interesting and enthusiastic people who are also fired up about science. Second, every once in a while I have moments in which I suddenly understand the solution to a problem that I've been working on - those are great moments. — David J. Anderson

There should be no grand, centralized choice made in the ivory tower. The minor cost-efficient advantage of the whole staff being trained in one method is far outweighed by the problems created - and the real cost, in ROI terms - by using the wrong process for the job. — David J. Anderson

The two pillars of the Toyota production system are just-in-time and automation with a human touch, or autonomation. — David J. Anderson

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

An act of leadership is to say that whatever's happening now is not good enough and suggest or show that we can do better. If you don't have that, then you don't have the catalyst for continuous improvement. — David J. Anderson

Successful ecologists are successful in part because they have prepared their minds to attack scientific problems using a variety of intellectual tools. — David J. Anderson

When teams are asked to work together to analyze problems and design solutions, the quality is higher. — David J. Anderson

Asking people to change behavior is difficult! — David J. Anderson

for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality. — David J. Anderson