Daily work Quote by Gene Kim
““However, we must remind everyone that improvement of daily work is more important than daily work itself, and that all teams must have dedicated capacity for this (e.g., reserving 20% of all cycles for improvement work, scheduling one day per week or one week per month, etc.). Without doing this, the productivity of the team will almost certainly grind to a halt under the weight of its own technical and process debt.””
About This Quote
Source Book: The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford, 2013
Teams must allocate dedicated time for continuous improvement, otherwise technical debt will cripple productivity.
In simple terms: Set regular time for improvement work.
Key Takeaway
Reserve time for process upgrades.
Themes
productivity
process
improvement
Mood
pragmatic
motivational
Type
management
operational
When to use this quote
- software development
- project planning
- team retrospectives
- training sessions
Key Concepts
lean
agile
technical debt
Questions to Reflect On
- How will you protect improvement time?
- What improvement could yield the biggest impact?
A Different Perspective
Improvement time may be hard to protect under pressure.
![“Bill Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, quipped that we used to treat servers like pets: “You name them and when they get sick, you nurse them back to health. [Now] servers are [treated] like cattle. You number them and when they get sick, you shoot them.” quote by Gene Kim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/e7b/gene-kim-2268_health_bill-baker-a-distinguished-engineer-at-m_187582.jpg)
