Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“Reorganizations that ignore Conway's Law, team cognitive load, and related dynamics risk acting like open heart surgery performed by a child: highly destructive.” – Matthew Skelton, Manual Pais in “Team Topologies”

“Keep the Product Backlog clean. Backlog items age like milk, not like wine” – Agile Product Manifesto

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir” – John Maynard Keynes when ask what he does when his forecast doesn't work out.

“I'd rather have good forecasts with bad news than bad forecasts with good news.” – Bjarte Bogsnes “Implementing Beyond Budgeting”

“It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time. Today is no different.” – Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

“The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.” – Ben Horowitz in “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers”

“Reorgs are … a wonderful method for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization” – Charlton Ogburn

“I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” - Tony Hoare in his Turing Award lecture

“The epiphany of integration points is that they control product development. They are the leverage points to improve the system. When timing of integration points slip, the project is in trouble.” - Dantar Oosterwal, The Lean Machine

“Working costs money, delivering makes money.” - Klaus Leopold from “Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing To Do With Business Agility”

“Quality has to be caused, not controlled” — Philip Crosby

“Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” — Tim Ferriss

“Whatever the problem, it’s always a people problem” —- Gerry Weinberg

“Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly, and finally, by a test campaign. And that's the way to answer them not by arguments around a table.” Claude Hopkins in “Scientific Advertising” published in 1923. This is the business argument for continuous delivery.

“Delivering value to the customer takes priority over delivering features” – Unknown, on NOT becoming a Feature Factory.

“When product developers choose to operate their processes at high levels of utilization, they create unnecessary and wasteful variability in their processes. It is important to realize that this variability is a self-inflicted wound.” — Donald G. Reinertsen

“Reducing risk, which is the primary mission of testing, clearly creates economic value for product developers. In fact, reducing risk is so centrally important to product development that it is indispensable for us to quantify its economic impact.” — Donald G. Reinertsen

“If we incentivize conformance, people will insert contingency reserves to prevent their tasks from missing the schedule. The more granular the schedule, the larger the schedule reserves. And these reserves aggregate into even longer timelines. The more we increase planning detail and the harder we try to incentivize performance, the worse our problem becomes.” — Donald G. Reinertsen

“In product development, our problem is virtually never motionless engineers. It is almost always motionless work products.” — Donald G. Reinertsen “The Principles of Product Development Flow”

“Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world.”— Lauren Bacall

“The people who sweep the floor should chose the broom” – Howard Behar

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” — Jim Barksdale, CEO Netflix

“Authorship drives ownership” – Unknown

“When you visualize your pain and gather data about it, it’s much easier to get the stakeholders’ and other teams’ understanding. It’s not you nagging, it’s data” — Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sundén, “Kanban in Action”

“Research shows that we become fonder for people and things we experience while we are eating.” — Linda Rising, “Fearless Change”

“Given that complete communication is never possible, the task on a project is not to try for complete communication but to manage the incompleteness of our communications” — Alistair Cockburn, Agile Software Development.

“ … if we have managers deciding . . . which services will be built, by which teams, we implicitly have managers deciding on the system architecture.” due to Conway’s Law — Ruth Malan

“[Conway’s law] creates an imperative to keep asking: “Is there a better design that is not available to us because of our organization?” —Mel Conway, Toward Simplifying Application Development, in a Dozen Lessons

“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change.” — Tom Peters

“Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.” — Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with the verbal communication.” — John P. Kotter, Leading Change

“Producers innovate; customers validate.” — not sure

“If you don't have encapsulation, you have to have orchestration” – Mike Cottmeyer on need for dependency management when Teams are not able to produce value themselves

“Less certainty. More inquiry.” — Erik Seidel

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths . . . and then reason up from there.” — Elon Musk

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” — Thomas Edison

“Good process is absolutely essential. Without defined processes, you can’t scale, you can’t put metrics and instrumentation in place, you can’t manage. But avoiding bureaucracy is essential. Bureaucracy is process run amok.” — Jeff Bezos

“Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because in the process we will catch excellence. I am not remotely interested in just being good.” — Vince Lombardi

“Agile evolution, like agility itself, is reality-based, and reality is messy, unpredictable, and not subject to brute force or wishful thinking.” — Rick Freedman

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” — Bill Gates

“The only way to control chaos and complexity is to give up some of that control.” — Gyan Nagpal

“Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it.” — Fred Wilson

“By multiplying milestones, we transform a long, amorphous race into one with many intermediate ‘finish lines’. As we push through each one, we experience a burst of pride as well as a jolt of energy to charge towards the next one.” — Chip and Dan Heath, The Power of Moments

“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others, it is the only means.” — Albert Einstein

“Many leaders pride themselves on setting the high-level direction and staying out of the details. But big picture, hands off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change - the paralyzing part - is in the details.” — Dan and Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs

“Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change … agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat.” – Jim Highsmith

“We are all familiar with guardrails on highways. They are put there to keep a simple mishap from turning into a full-blown catastrophe. If you go a little off course, the rails help you regain the path towards your destination.” – Anonymous