The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

by Gene Kim

He’s definitely a smart guy but can be intimidating because of how much he knows. What makes it worse is that he’s right most of the time.

“Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts.

“What that graph says is that everyone needs idle time, or slack time. If no one has slack time, WIP gets stuck in the system. Or more specifically, stuck in queues, just waiting.”