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.”

“Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! 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.”

“Brent is a worker, not a work center,” I say again. “And I’m betting that Brent is probably a worker supporting way too many work centers. Which is why he’s a constraint.” “Now we’re getting somewhere!” Erik says, smiling. Gesturing broadly at the plant floor below, he says, “Imagine if twenty-five percent of all the work centers down there could only be operated by one person named Brent. What would happen to the flow of work?” I close my eyes to think. “Work wouldn’t complete on time, because Brent can only be at one work center at a time,”

Total Productive Maintenance, which has been embraced by the Lean Community. tpm insists that we do whatever it takes to assure machine availability by elevating maintenance.

“Sensei Mike Rother says that 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.”

“This is all about scoping what really matters inside of it. And like when Mr. Sphere told everyone in Flatland, you must leave the realm of it to discover where the business relies on it to achieve its goals.” I hear him continue, “Your mission is twofold: You must find where you’ve under-scoped it—where certain portions of the processes and technology you manage actively jeopardizes the achievement of business goals—as codified by Dick’s measurements. And secondly, John must find where he’s over-scoped it, such as all those sox-404 it controls that weren’t necessary to detect material errors in the financial statements.