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

by Gene Kim

In the Marines, keeping the barracks neat and tidy was not only for aesthetics but also for safety. Old habits die hard.

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.

I know you’ll provide them with whatever help they need. This is important.”

You don’t become a senior nco in the Marines without being able to play politics.

Issue 127. Insecure Windows operating system max_syn_cookie setting’?

This violates the required segregation of duty required to prevent risk for fraud.”

These things are so fragile that if you even look at them at the wrong time of day, they’ll crash and require all sorts of voodoo to get them to successfully reboot. They’ll never survive the changes you’re proposing!”

“Wow, boss, nice gear. What is that, a Kaypro II? I haven’t seen one of those in about thirty years.

Let me know if you need an 8-inch floppy to load CP/M on it—I’ve got one in my attic at home.”

who is planning the change, the system being changed, and a one-sentence summary.

Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production

System, and Total Quality Management.

fly by the seat of our pants.

“I’m not complaining.

The Goal

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

Falling back on old training on handling frustrated people, I calmly reiterate what I already stated.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team,

“Steve, we definitely need your help to make this happen,” I say. “My guys are routinely strong-armed into doing pet projects by almost every manager in this company. I think we need an e-mail from you to the entire company, not only explaining why you’re doing this, but what the consequences will be if someone tries to put unauthorized work into the system.”

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

“Well, to be more accurate, you’re actually building a bill of resources. That’s the bill of materials along with the list of the required work centers and the routing. Once you have that, along with the work orders and your resources, you’ll finally be able to get a handle on what your capacity and demand is. This is what will enable you to finally know whether you can accept new work and then actually be able to schedule the work.”

‘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.

How does one objectively decide whether “consolidating and upgrading e-mail server” is more or less important than “upgrading thirty-five instances of sql databases”?

depend upon resource utilization. “The wait time is the ‘percentage of time busy’ divided by the ‘percentage of time idle.’

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.”

to gain assurance for reliability of financial reporting, compliance with laws and regulations, and efficiency and effectiveness of operations.

‘coso Cube.’”

“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

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

“In manufacturing, we have a measure called takt time, which is the cycle time needed in order to keep up with customer demand. If any operation in the flow of work takes longer than the takt time, you will not be able to keep up with customer demand.”

Taiichi Ohno,

“You’ve got to figure out how to decrease your changeover

Then you need to automate the entire environment creation process. You need a deployment pipeline where you can create test and production environments, and then deploy code into them, entirely on-demand.

“Stop focusing on the deployment target rate. Business agility is not just about raw speed. It’s about how good you are at detecting and responding to changes in the market and being able to take larger and more calculated risks. It’s

guessing that they’d think we’re building a ‘value stream map.’

As Christopher Little, a software executive and one of the earliest chroniclers of DevOps, said, “Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they’re in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license.”

We conduct planned exercises to practice large-scale failures, randomly kill processes and compute servers in production, and inject network latencies and other nefarious acts

The Mythical Man-Month,

“deploys per day per developer.”

improvement kata.

modular, well encapsulated, and loosely-coupled so that small teams are able to work with high degrees of autonomy, with failures being small and contained, and without causing global disruptions.

Containerization

Our goal is to decrease the amount of time required for changes to be deployed into production and to increase the reliability and quality of those services.

To help us see where work is flowing well and where work is queued or stalled, we need to make our work as visible as possible.

kanban boards or sprint planning boards, where we can represent work on physical or electronic cards.

As a result, daily work becomes dominated by the priority du jour, often with requests for urgent work coming in through every communication mechanism possible, including ticketing systems, outage calls, emails, phone calls, chat rooms, and management escalations.

For instance, an engineer assigned to multiple projects must switch between tasks, incurring all the costs of having to re-establish context, as well as cognitive rules and goals.

we may have nothing to do because we are waiting on someone else.