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

by Gene Kim

Because they’re likely art or music majors, not people with a technology background, they’ll publicly promise the impossible and it will have to figure out how to deliver.

Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn’t crashing production systems, and I’ll show you one who can’t fog a mirror. Or more likely, is on vacation.

Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.

This type of all-hands effort is just another part of life in it, but it makes me angry when we need to make some heroic, diving catch because of someone else’s lack of planning.

“a ‘change’ is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.”

“You probably don’t even see when work is committed to your organization. And if you can’t see it, you can’t manage it—let alone organize it, sequence it, and have any assurance that your resources can complete it.”

“In the 1980s, this plant was the beneficiary of three incredible scientifically-grounded management movements. You’ve probably heard of them: the Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management.

Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.”

“Your job as vp of it Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure it service.”

“The First Way helps us understand how to create fast flow of work as it moves from Development into it Operations, because that’s what’s between the business and the customer. The Second Way shows us how to shorten and amplify feedback loops, so we can fix quality at the source and avoid rework. And the Third Way shows us how to create a culture that simultaneously fosters experimentation, learning from failure, and understanding that repetition and practice are the prerequisites to mastery.”

A fellow nco in the Marines once told me that his priorities were the following: provider, parent, spouse, and change agent. In that order.

“Remember, outcomes are what matter—not the process, not controls, or, for that matter, what work you complete.”

“A great team doesn’t mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.

You guys in the business are punch drunk on projects, taking on new work that doesn’t have a prayer of succeeding. Why? Because you have no idea what capacity you actually have. You’re like the guy who is always writing checks that bounce, because you don’t know how much money you have and never bother opening your mail.

“every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures.

‘Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.’ The Third Way is all about ensuring that we’re continually putting tension into the system, so that we’re continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

“A critical part of the Second Way is making wait times visible, so you know when your work spends days sitting in someone’s queue—or worse, when work has to go backward, because it doesn’t have all the parts or requires rework.

You win when you protect the organization without putting meaningless work into the it system. And you win even more when you can take meaningless work out of the it system.”

how wait times depend upon resource utilization.

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.”

“To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.”

“As part of the First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that it operates in. W. Edwards Deming called this ‘appreciation for the system.’

“Some of the wisest auditors say that there are only three internal control objectives: to gain assurance for reliability of financial reporting, compliance with laws and regulations, and efficiency and effectiveness of operations.

Nothing unifies people better than complaining about it.

Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill.

Repetition, especially for things that require teamwork, creates trust and transparency.

As Sensei Goldratt would say, you’ve deployed an amazing technology, but because you haven’t changed the way you work, you haven’t actually diminished a limitation.”

everyone in technology was already all too familiar with the problems commonly associated with Waterfall software delivery processes and large, complex, “big bang” production deployments.

These people are knowledge Hoarders. This doesn’t work. Everyone is replaceable. No matter how talented they are. Sure it may take longer at first to find out how to do that special task, but it will happen without them.

Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, wrote, “In previous economic eras, businesses created value by moving atoms. Now they create value by moving bits.”

you can read my full interview with him on CA.com, “Face-to-Face DevOps: To Protect and Serve.”

“Learning is not compulsory...neither is survival.”

The methodology used to create, link, and compute Dick’s organizational kpis to it activities is based on the Risk-Adjusted Value Managementtm methodology, developed by Paul Proctor and Michael Smith at Gartner, Inc.

Agile often serves as an effective enabler of DevOps, because of its focus on small teams continually delivering high quality code to customers.

success in modern technical endeavors absolutely requires multiple perspectives and expertise to collaborate.

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, stated, “Every industry and company that is not bringing software to the core of their business will be disrupted.”

Or as Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, said, “In previous economic eras, businesses created value by moving atoms. Now they create value by moving bits.”