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

by Gene Kim

controlling the flow of work from Development to it Operations.

by freezing and throttling the project releases, but your batch sizes are still way too large.

creating constant feedback loops from it Operations back into Development, designing quality into the product at the earliest stages.

“In any system of work, the theoretical ideal is single-piece flow, which maximizes throughput and minimizes variance. You get there by continually reducing batch sizes.

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

“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.”

An inevitable consequence of long release cycles is that you’ll never hit the internal rate of return targets, once you factor in the cost of labor.

takt time, which is the cycle time needed in order to keep up with customer demand.

If any operation in the flow of work takes longer than the takt time, you will not be able to keep up with customer demand.”

feedback loop that goes all the way back to the earliest parts of product definition, design, and development,”

order lead times were cut from one month to less than a week. We could build and deliver whatever and however many the customer wanted and never had a warehouse full of crap that we’d need to liquidate at fire-sale prices.

reducing the batch size, enabling fast feature flow.

You need to get everything in version control.

Not just the code, but everything required to build the environment.

you need to automate the entire environment creation process. You need a deployment pipeline where you can create test and production environments, and then...

how good you are at detecting and responding to changes in the market and being able to take larger and more calculated risks.

the faster you can get those features to market and test them, the better off you’ll be.

you also pay back the business faster for the use of capital, which means the business starts making money faster,

enabling Marketing to make their own changes to content or business rules or enabling faster experimentation and a/b split testing, to see what offers work best?”

have deployable code but also the exact environment that the code deploys into, and have that checked into version control, too.”

“Can you list your top risks we should be thinking about, and prepare a list of potential countermeasures and controls?”

we’re paying them not just to maintain the application but also to make any needed business changes.

“How many people do they have allocated to our account?”

“Evil Chaos Monkey.” Instead of generating operational faults in production, it would constantly try to exploit security holes, fuzz our applications with storms of malformed packets, try to install backdoors, gain access to confidential data, and all sorts of other nefarious attacks.

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

Understanding what technology can and can’t do has become a core competency that every part of this business must have.

take calculated risks, without jeopardizing the entire enterprise.

I want to see you grow and learn, and build new skills to best help all of Parts Unlimited.

do rotations in sales and marketing, manage a plant, get international experience, manage the relationships of our most critical suppliers, and manage our supply chain.

Any coo who doesn’t intimately understand the it systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.”

to effectively manage it is not only a critical competency but a significant predictor of company performance,”

Product Management, Development, it Operations,

Information Security