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

by Gene Kim

“It’s like the free puppy,” I continue. “It’s not the upfront capital that kills you, it’s the operations and maintenance on the back end.”

Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.

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

there are four types of it Operations work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work. But, we’re only talking about the first type of work, and the unplanned work that get’s created when we do it wrong.

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.”

“The flow of work should ideally go in one direction only: forward. When I see work going backward, I think ‘waste.’ It might be because of defects, lack of specification, or rework… Regardless, it’s something we should fix.”

until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it’s merely wip stuck in the system.

In DevOps, we typically define our technology value stream as the process required to convert a business hypothesis into a technology-enabled service that delivers value to the customer.

value is created only when our services are running in production,

The First Way enables fast left-to-right flow of work from Development to Operations to the customer. In order to maximize flow, we need to make work visible, reduce our batch sizes and intervals of work, build in quality by preventing defects from being passed to downstream work centers, and constantly optimize for the global goals.

The Second Way enables the fast and constant flow of feedback from right to left at all stages of our value stream. It requires that we amplify feedback to prevent problems from happening again, or enable faster detection and recovery. By doing this, we create quality at the source and generate or embed knowledge where it is needed—this allows us to create ever-safer systems of work where problems are found and fixed long before a catastrophic failure occurs.

The Third Way enables the creation of a generative, high-trust culture that supports a dynamic, disciplined, and scientific approach to experimentation and risk-taking, facilitating the creation of organizational learning, both from our successes and failures. Furthermore, by continually shortening and amplifying our feedback loops, we create ever-safer systems of work and are better able to take risks and perform experiments that help us learn faster than our competition and win in the marketplace.

in the absence of improvements, processes don’t stay the same—due to chaos and entropy, processes actually degrade over time.