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

by Gene Kim

Bad multitasking often occurs when people are assigned to multiple projects, resulting in many prioritization problems.

any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.”

The effectiveness of approval processes decreases as we push decision-making further away from where the work is performed.

Requiring another team to complete tedious, error-prone, and manual tasks that could be easily automated and run as needed by the team who needs the work performed Requiring approvals from busy people who are distant from the work, forcing them to make decisions without an adequate knowledge of the work or the potential implications, or to merely rubber stamp their approvals Creating large volumes of documentation of questionable detail which become obsolete shortly after they are written Pushing large batches of work to teams and special committees for approval and processing and then waiting for responses

“It’s impossible for a developer to learn anything when someone yells at them for something they broke six months ago—that’s why we need to provide feedback to everyone as quickly as possible, in minutes, not months.”

Lean defines two types of customers that we must design for: the external customer (who most likely pays for the service we are delivering) and the internal customer (who receives and processes the work immediately after us).

Generative organizations are characterized by actively seeking and sharing information to better enable the organization to achieve its mission. Responsibilities are shared throughout the value stream, and failure results in reflection and genuine inquiry.

“By removing blame, you remove fear; by removing fear, you enable honesty; and honesty enables prevention.”

Bethany Macri @ Etsy

Mike Rother observed in Toyota Kata that in the absence of improvements, processes don’t stay the same—due to chaos and entropy, processes actually degrade over time.

“Even more important than daily work is the improvement of daily work.”

tacit knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing) into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else’s expertise through practice.

In other words, leaders lead by “making all the right decisions.”

the leader’s role is to create the conditions so their team can discover greatness in their daily work. In other words, creating greatness requires both leaders and workers, each of whom are mutually dependent upon each other.