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

by Gene Kim

I always liked that phrase in Saving Private Ryan: “There’s a chain of command: gripes go up, not down.”

any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.

the Three Ways,” he says. “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.”

the First Way, which is creating fast flow of work through Development and it Operations. Index cards on a kanban board is one of the best mechanisms to do this, because everyone can see wip

you definitely need to know about constraints because you need to increase flow.

read The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt.

There are five focusing steps which Sensei Goldratt describes in The Goal: Step 1 is to identify the constraint.

Step 2 is to exploit the constraint,

Step 3, which is to subordinate the constraint.

“One of my favorite books about team dynamics is Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

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

“Properly elevating preventive work is at the heart of programs like 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.

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.

it almost doesn’t matter what you improve, as long as you’re improving something.

Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse,

“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.

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.

By showing how it risks jeopardize business performance measures, you can start making better business decisions.

the Second Way, creating constant feedback loops from it Operations back into Development, designing quality into the product at the earliest stages.

Dev and Ops working together, along with qa and the business, are a super-tribe that can achieve amazing things.

the practices and principles that enable multiple deployments per day in their seminal book Continuous Delivery.

You need a deployment pipeline where you can create test and production environments, and then deploy code into them, entirely on-demand.