I lucked out the other day and came across a copy of Kanban: Just-in-time at Toyota at the Aoyama Book Center clearing sale. As I had already recently started reading the Poppendieck's first book on Lean Software Development, and it was massively discounted, I snapped it up for a cool 1700yen.
I've spent the last few days reading it on my commute to the office and have been trying to approach the lessons within the book with the perspective of applying the ideas to Systems and Network Administration. Here's a quote that stood out for me.
"You have just bought these machines, and they still do not have the human touch. That human touch must be provided by you. By human touch we mean that we want you to impute your knowledge to the machines you handle. If you simply just operate the machines you bought, you do not show any particular ingenuity. To make your daily work worthy of you, put your touch to the automated machine" -- Sakichi Toyoda
This very eloquently sums up the point of using tools like Chef or Puppet in the systems space. Highly recommended read.
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