Hans Samios' Personal Lean-Agile Knowledge Base

“Weinberg-Brooks’ Law: More software projects have gone awry from management’s taking action based on incorrect system models than for all other causes combined. Causation Fallacy: Every effect has a cause … and we can tell which is which.” – Gerry Weinberg

“Consequently, this book suggests that one cornerstone for large-scale Scrum and agile development is people who learn and apply various thinking tools, including (but not limited to) systems thinking, mental-model awareness, lean thinking, queueing theory, and recognition of false dichotomies.” – Craig Larman, Bas Vodde from “Scaling Lean and Agile Development”

“Whether you believe that you can do a thing or not, you are right.” – Henry Ford

“The Wright brothers achieved the dream of flight through an organized, disciplined process of diligently orchestrated learning cycles. Each learning cycle was designed to create knowledge, which they captured on limit and trade-off curves. They had set out to undertake a study of flight and make a contribution in advancing the knowledge of powered flight. The process they employed was so successful that the result was the invention of the airplane. Clearly, there is much to be learned from their process.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.” – John Wooden

“To unilaterally optimize the overall flow of projects across the entire development portfolio, a product development cadence must be established.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Actions that optimize individual projects generally serve to sub-optimize the portfolio of projects as a whole.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Cadence is even more critical in the product development environment, where flow is not inherently observable” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Cadence is the metronome to pace work in all areas of business outside standard, routine production.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“A firefighting organization requires extraordinary people to achieve ordinary results. In an exceptional organization, ordinary people achieve extraordinary results routinely.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“In contrast to work standards, standardized work is determined collectively by the group closest to the work.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“When a genuine shared vision (no to be confused with the all-to-familiar “vision statement”) is built, people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Someone who achieves a high level of personal mastery lives in a continual learning mode with no end state. They never “arrive.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in “The Lean Machine”

“The five disciplines of a learning organization are: 1. Systems thinking. 2. Personal mastery. 3. Mental models. 4. Building shared vision. 5. Collective team learning.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Complex systems exhibit several kinds of telltale behaviour. I will describe some of these behaviours briefly here; they will be examined in more detail in later chapters. • self-organization into patterns, as occurs with flocks of birds or schools of fish • chaotic behaviour where small changes in initial conditions (‘the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina’) produce large later changes (‘a hurricane in the Caribbean’) • ‘fat-tailed’ behaviour, where rare events (e.g. mass extinctions and market crashes) occur much more often than would be predicted by a normal (bell-curve) distribution • adaptive interaction, where interacting agents (as in markets or the Prisoner’s Dilemma) modify their strategies in diverse ways as experience accumulates. In addition, as already mentioned, emergent behaviour is an essential requirement for calling a system ‘complex’.” – John Holland from “A Very Short Introduction to Complexity”

“Restated for complex systems: emergent properties at any level must be consistent with interactions specified at the lower level(s).” – John Holland from “A Very Short Introduction to Complexity”

“Each of these complex systems exhibits a distinctive property called emergence, roughly described by the common phrase ‘the action of the whole is more than the sum of the actions of the parts” – John Holland from “A Very Short Introduction to Complexity”

“The point here is that most reasonable people don’t have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.” – Patrick Lencioni from “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”

“Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.” – Patrick Lencioni from “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”

“I want to assure you that there is only one reason that we are here at this off-site, and at the company: to achieve results. This, in my opinion, is the only true measure of a team” – Patrick Lencioni from “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”

“It is not enough that management commit themselves to quality and productivity, they must know what it is they must do. Such a responsibility cannot be delegated.” – W. Edwards Deming from Out of the Crisis, 1986

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker

“Operating a product development process near full utilization is an economic disaster.” – Don Reinertsen

“If you only quantify one thing, quantify Cost of Delay” – Don Reinertsen “Principles of Product Development Flow”

“You can't scale crappy code.” – Dean Leffingwell

“Provide sufficient capacity margin to enable cadence.” – Don Reinertsen “Principles of Product Development Flow”

“Innovation comes from the producer.” – W. Edward Demings.

“No useful improvement was ever invented as a desk” – Taiichi Ohno

“Any inefficiency of decentralization costs less than the value of faster response time.” – Don Reinertsen “Principles of Product Development Flow”

“Today's development processes typically deliver information asynchronously in large batches. Flow-based processes deliver information in a regular cadence of small batches.” – Don Reinertsen

“When WIP and utilization become too high, you will see a sudden and catastrophic reduction in throughput.” – Don Reinertsen

“People are already doing their best; the problems are with the system. Only management can change the system.” – W. Edwards Deming.

“I like to assume that no one came to work with the explicit intention of pissing me off or doing the wrong thing.” – Hans Samios

“A common disease that afflicts management the world over is the impression that 'Our problems are different.' They are different for sure, but the principles that will help to improve the quality of product and service are universal in nature.” – W. Edwards Deming

“Understanding economics requires an understanding of the interaction amongst multiple variables.” – Don Reinertsen “Principles of Product Development Flow”

“Left to themselves, components (of a system) become selfish, independent profit centers and thus destroy the system.” – W. Edwards Deming

“All we are doing is looking at the timeline, from when the customer gives us an order to when we collect cash And we are reducing the timeline by reducing the non-value added wastes.” - Taiichi Ohno

“Development managers today face an important trade-off between steady state of performance and the system's ability to accommodate unanticipated changes in resource requirements without descending into the firefighting cycle … Development managers and company leadership with a desire to avoid firefighting must rethink their approach to managing multi-project development portfolios.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“People who operate within the development system are rarely directly to blame. Individual mistakes happen. However, consistent lack of performance must be attributed to systemic issues. To improve the development system, it must first be recognized that a bad system will always undermine even the best efforts of good people. Bad systems beat good people every time!” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“There was in fact no correlation between exiting phase gates on time and project success. The data suggested the inverse was true.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Any project that costs more than $1 million in normalized labor is a waste of money, time, and resources.” - The Standish Group asserts this startling conclusion in its “Factors of Value”report (June 29, 2015).

“Integration points control product development.” – Dantar P. Oosterwal in "The Lean Machine"

“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available” – “Benford's Law of Controversy”, Gregory Benford, 1980

“The most important and visible outcropping of the action bias in the excellent companies is their willingness to try things out, to experiment. There is absolutely no magic in the experiment … But our experience has been that most big institutions have forgotten how to test and learn. They seem to prefer analysis and debate to trying something out, and they are paralyzed by fear of failure, however small.” – Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence (Peters & Waterman, 1982)

“Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality. Improve process and build quality into the product in the first place.” – Deming

“A project plan is like a lettuce. On the day you buy it, it looks firm and crispy; a week later its a bit wilty around the edges, and after a month its unrecognizable.” – Martin Fowler quoting a project manager.

“If I have learned one thing it is this: there is no answer. There is never an answer; there are only better questions.”

“… doing the wrong thing righter …” – Russell Ackoff

“Most people do not listen to understand, they listen to reply” – Stephen Covey

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day.” – Carl Sagan