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

by Gene Kim

talk to the business process owners for the objectives on Dick’s second slide. Find out what their exact roles are, what business processes underpin their goals, and then get from them the top list of things that jeopardize those goals. “You must understand the value chains required to achieve each of Dick’s goals, including the ones that aren’t so visible, like those in it. For instance, if you were a cross-country freight shipping company that delivers packages using a fleet of one hundred trucks, one of your corporate goals would be customer satisfaction and on-time delivery.” I hear him continue, “Everybody knows that one factor jeopardizing on-time delivery is vehicle breakdowns. A key causal factor for vehicle breakdowns is failure to change the oil. So, to mitigate that risk, you’d create an sla for vehicle operations to change the oil every five thousand miles.” Obviously enjoying himself, he keeps explaining, “Our organizational key performance indicator (kpi) is on-time delivery. So to achieve it, you would create a new forward-looking kpi of, say, the percentage of vehicles that have had their required oil changes performed.