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

by Gene Kim

“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.”

wip is one of the root causes for chronic due-date problems, quality issues, and expediters having to rejuggle priorities every day.

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.”

I’m pretty sure we don’t do any sort of analysis of capacity and demand before we accept work. Which means we’re always scrambling, having to take shortcuts, which means more fragile applications in production. Which means more unplanned work and firefighting in the future.

If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.”

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. As Bill said, ‘around and around we go.’ It’s the it capacity death spiral.”

it almost doesn’t matter what you improve, as long as you’re improving something. Why? Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse, which ensures that there is no path to zero errors, zero work-related accidents, and zero loss.”

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.”

the relationship between it and the business is like a dysfunctional marriage—both feel powerless and held hostage by the other.