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

by Gene Kim

Each year, it gets harder. We have to do more with less, to simultaneously maintain competitiveness and reduce costs.

cio stands for “Career Is Over.” And vps of it Operations don’t last much longer.

Show me a developer who isn’t crashing production systems, and I’ll show you one who can’t fog a mirror. Or more likely, is on vacation.

She has a reputation for loving processes more than people and is often in the position of trying to impose order on the chaos in it.

reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.

The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security. The two working together gives us means, motive, and opportunity.

“As they say, once is coincidence. Twice is happenstance. Third must be enemy action.

Perfection is the enemy of good.

I think you could end up being the auditors’ best friend.” “Auditors have friends?” she laughs.

“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.”

you can’t achieve the strategic until you’ve mastered the tactical,”

“In the 1980s, this plant was the beneficiary of three incredible scientifically-grounded management movements. You’ve probably heard of them: the Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management.

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

“Let me guess. You’re going to say that it is pure knowledge work, and so therefore, all your work is like that of an artisan. Therefore, there’s no place for standardization, documented work procedures, and all that high-falutin’ ‘rigor and discipline’ that you claimed to hold so near and dear.”

“Your job as vp of it Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure it service.”

It would be like talking about acrobatics to someone who doesn’t believe in gravity yet.

“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.”

“What I’d like to get out of our meeting is an understanding of the relative priority of Phoenix versus the audit findings and to talk about the number of projects and how to adequately staff them.”

been able to take a day off without a pager in about three years. You know, he’ll burst into tears when we offer that to him.”

used to love this work, but it’s gotten so much more difficult over the last ten years. Technology keeps changing faster and faster, and it’s nearly impossible to keep up anymore.”

“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.”

provider, parent, spouse, and change agent. In that order.

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.

I gave you one category, which was business projects, like Phoenix,” I say. “Later, I realized that I didn’t mention internal it projects. A week after that, I realized that changes are another category of work. But it was only after the Phoenix fiasco that I saw the last one, because of how it prevented all other work from getting completed, and that’s the last category, isn’t it? Firefighting. Unplanned work.”

“Erik described the relationship between a ceo and a cio as a dysfunctional marriage. That both sides feel powerless and held hostage by the other.”

“There are two things I’ve learned in the last month. One is that it matters. it is not just a department that I can delegate away. it is smack in the middle of every major company effort we have and is critical to almost every aspect of daily operations.”

apology not expected, but appreciated.”

it is not just a department. it is a competency that we need to gain as an entire company.

me understand that there are four types of it Operations work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.

“As you know, unplanned work is not free,” he continues. “Quite the opposite. It’s very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of…” He looks around professorially for an answer. Wes finally speaks up, “Planned work?”

“Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts. As Bill said, ‘around and around we go.’ It’s the it capacity death spiral.”

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

‘Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.’

that repetition creates habits, and habits are what enable mastery.

“When a resource is ninety-nine percent utilized, you have to wait ninety-nine times as long as if that resource is fifty percent utilized.”

Improving something anywhere not at the constraint is an illusion.

“The wait time is the ‘percentage of time busy’ divided by the ‘percentage of time idle.’

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

“As part of the First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that it operates in. W. Edwards Deming called this ‘appreciation for the system.’ When

“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.

when you’ve built out the value chains, linking his objectives to how it jeopardizes it. Assembling concrete examples of how it issues have jeopardized those goals in the past. Make sure you’re prepared.”

a great team performs best when they practice. Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill.

Sensei Goldratt would say, you’ve deployed an amazing technology, but because you haven’t changed the way you work, you haven’t actually diminished a limitation.”

He automated the build and deployment process, recognizing that infrastructure could be treated as code,

In my day, developers wore pocket protectors—not vintage T-shirts and sandals—and carried slide rules, not skateboards.

Developers. I’ll never understand them.

“You know, when Erik and I first met, many months ago, he said that the relationship between it and the business is like a dysfunctional marriage—both feel powerless and held hostage by the other. I’ve thought about this for months, and I finally figured something out. “A dysfunctional marriage assumes that the business and it are two separate entities. it should either be embedded into business operations or into the business. Voilà! There you go. No tension. No marriage, and maybe no it Department, either.”

me, ‘Messiahs are good, but scripture is better.’”

However, virtually everyone in technology was already all too familiar with the problems commonly associated with Waterfall software delivery processes and large, complex, “big bang” production deployments. This dissatisfaction with the status quo was driving increased adoption of not just DevOps, but also Agile and Lean.

Theory of Constraints body of knowledge.