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

by Gene Kim

It’s crazy what programmers, and even managers like me, have to learn every couple of years. Sometimes it’s a totally new database technology, a new programming or project management method, or a new technology delivery model, like cloud computing.

fr

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. Like Phoenix.

dark matter

“Unlike the other categories of work, unplanned work is recovery work, which almost always takes you away from your goals. That’s why it’s so important to know where your unplanned work is coming from.”

A great team doesn’t mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.

trust

He’s wearing a faded T-shirt and a zippered, hooded sweatshirt with a faded union logo.

smart casual

“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.”

“He used the word kata, because he understood that repetition creates habits, and habits are what enable mastery. Whether you’re talking about sports training, learning a musical instrument, or training in the Special Forces, nothing is more to mastery than practice and drills. Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours. And if you want to create a genuine culture of improvement, you must create those habits.”

“I’m experimenting with putting kanbans around our key resources. Any activities they work on must go through the kanban. Not by e-mail, instant message, telephone, or whatever. “If it’s not on the kanban board, it won’t get done,” she says. “And more importantly, if it is on the kanban board, it will get done quickly. You’d be amazed at how fast work is getting completed, because we’re limiting the work in process. Based on our experiments so far, I think we’re going to be able to predict lead times for work and get faster throughput than ever.”

“Physical servers are such a pain in the ass.”