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

by Gene Kim

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.

How can we manage production if we don’t know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are?

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

“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.”

No offense, but did you switch medication recently?” I smile wanly, “No, but I did have a conversation with a raving madman on a catwalk overlooking the manufacturing plant floor.”

I had discovered three of the four categories of work: business projects, internal projects, and changes. He merely said that there was one more type of work, maybe the most important type, because it’s so destructive.

Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.

The fourth category of work is unplanned work!”

The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt.

until you create a trusted system to manage the flow of work to the constraint, the constraint is constantly wasted, which means that the constraint is likely being drastically underutilized.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. To do that, you need to know what matters to the achievement of the business objectives, whether it’s projects, operations, strategy, compliance with laws and regulations, security, or whatever.”

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

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.”

the four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work. Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!”

“To fix your problem, you need to do a lot more than just learning how to say no. That’s the tip of the iceberg.”

“every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures. Suppose for the machine, we select the heat treat oven. The men are the two people required to execute the predefined steps, and we obviously will need measures based on the outcomes of executing the steps in the method.”

“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. As one of my senseis would say, ‘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.

“To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.”

always confirming that the entire organization achieves its goal, not just one part of it.

“This is all about scoping what really matters

“Metaphors like oil changes help people make that connection. Preventive oil changes and vehicle maintenance policies are like preventive vendor patches and change management policies. By showing how it risks jeopardize business performance measures, you can start making better business decisions.

The need to continually reduce cycle times is part of the First Way. The need for amplification of feedback loops, ideally from the customer, is part of the Second Way.

“As part of the Second Way, you need to create a feedback loop that goes all the way back to the earliest parts of product definition, design, and development,”

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 about continual experimentation,

We need to create a culture that reinforces the value of taking risks and learning from failure and the need for repetition and practice to create mastery.

The methodology used to create, link, and compute Dick’s organizational kpis to it activities is based on the Risk-Adjusted Value Managementtm methodology, developed by Paul Proctor and Michael Smith at Gartner, Inc.

The principles of Flow, which accelerate the delivery of work from Development to Operations to our customers The principles of Feedback, which enable us to create ever safer systems of work The principles of Continual Learning and Experimentation foster a high-trust culture and a scientific approach to organizational improvement risk-taking as part of our daily work

He concluded that the Lean community missed the most important practice of all, which he called the improvement kata. He explains that every organization has work routines, and the improvement kata requires creating structure for the daily, habitual practice of improvement work, because daily practice is what improves outcomes. The constant cycle of establishing desired future states, setting weekly target outcomes, and the continual improvement of daily work is what guided improvement at Toyota.

The leader helps coach the person conducting the experiment with questions that may include: What was your last step and what happened? What did you learn? What is your condition now? What is your next target condition? What obstacle are you working on now? What is your next step? What is your expected outcome? When can we check?