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figuring out what we have time to do and what systems can actually be patched.”
What I need from you is what resources we need.
What does the list look like right now? Where can I get a copy? Who owns the list?”
a lot of the commitments just aren’t written down.”
How can we manage production if we don’t know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are?
I’m trying to get the list of what all our commitments to the organization are. How big is that list and how do things get on it?”
We can’t make new commitments to other people when we don’t even know what our commitments are now!”
for each of those resources, tell me what their other commitments are that we’re going to be pulling them off of.”
“Make sure you tell people that we’re doing this so we can get more resources. I don’t want anyone thinking that we’re outsourcing or firing anyone,
“You just want a list of organizational commitments for our key resources, with a one-liner on what they’re working on and how long it will take.
which resources are most overutilized and how many new resources we need. That would be the basis of an ask to Steve for more staffing.”
stay focused on the things that matter most to the company.
change controls,
sustainable process that will prevent friendly-fire incidents and get the auditors off our back, while still being able to get work done.
a list of authorized and scheduled changes
“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.”
make sure everyone keeps helping us get there. It’s not just to satisfy the audit findings. We need some way to plan, communicate, and make our changes safely.
you don’t release work based on the availability of the first station. Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.”
Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.”
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.”
“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.
Third Way shows us how to create a culture that simul...
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experimentation, learning from failure, and understanding that repetition and practice are th...
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Either we need to cut down the project list, or we’ve got to staff up.”
You’ve been consistent and clear that Phoenix is the most important, but we can’t seem to keep resources dedicated to it.
“The 80/20 rule likely applies here: Twenty percent of the changes pose eighty percent of the risk.”
We’re predefining high-risk categories of change that not only must have change requests submitted, but must have authorization before being scheduled and implemented.”
people have appropriately informed anyone they could affect, and gotten the ‘okay to proceed’ from all of them.”
the integrity of the process, not so much about the actual changes.”
business projects
internal it projects.
changes
“At the end of each incident, we’ll have one more article in our knowledge base of how to fix a hairy problem and a growing pool of people who can execute the fix.”
When senior engineers get to the level of Brent, or aspire to be Brent, they want to learn and share what they’ve done.
We’ve got to get all this knowledge into the hands of people actually doing the work.
But when was the question ever asked whether we should accept the work? And on what basis did we ever make that decision?
It’s not a good sign when they’re still attaching parts to the space shuttle at liftoff time.
“If you turn the circuit board on and no smoke comes out, it’ll probably work.”
I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to replicate it, because there are too many moving parts.”
lack of competence is the enemy of good.
“It’s not the upfront capital that kills you, it’s the operations and maintenance on the back end.”
business projects, internal projects, and changes.
Maybe what I’m looking for is like dark matter. You can only see it by what it displaces or how it interacts with other matter that we can see.
firefighting.
Unplanned work.
Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it.
coordinating changes better so they don’t fail, ensuring the orderly handling of incidents and outages to prevent interrupting key resources, doing whatever it takes so that Brent won’t be escalated to…
I tried to take all necessary steps to keep people from doing wrong work, or rather, unplanned work.
‘anti-work,’
