The Phoenix Project Quotes

“The vendor assured us that it’s safe, and we checked all their references.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Developers are even worse than networking people. 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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“In 1958, the Fortune 500 tenure was 61 years; now it’s only 18 years.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“gregarious”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We’re on the hook for a huge number of projects. So, let’s look at what our capacity is.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“virtualized environments from Bill’s team work as expected, we can go into production one week from Friday.” I gape at Chris. He just made up an arbitrary date to go into production, with complete disregard for all the things we need to do before deployment. I have a sudden flashback. In the Marines, we had a ritual for”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve figured out that the trick to a long career in IT Operations management is to get enough seniority to get good things done but to keep your head low enough to avoid the political battles that make you inherently vulnerable.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You’re right that you can’t achieve the strategic until you’ve mastered the tactical,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You’ve helped me see that IT is not merely a department. Instead, it’s pervasive, like electricity. It’s a skill, like being able to read or do math.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! 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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Remember, outcomes are what matter—not the process, not controls, or, for that matter, what work you complete.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“He turns around and resumes his pace, saying over his shoulder, “Tell me. All those projects that Jimmy your CISO is pushing. Do they increase the flow of project work through the IT organization?” “No,” I quickly answer, rushing to catch up again. “Do they increase operational stability or decrease the time required to detect and recover from outages or security breaches?” I think a bit longer. “Probably not. A lot of it is just more busywork, and in most cases, the work they’re asking for is risky and actually could cause outages.” “Do these projects increase Brent’s capacity?” I laugh humorlessly. “No, the opposite. The audit issues alone could tie up Brent for the next year.” “And what would doing all of Jimmy’s projects do to WIP levels?” he asks, opening the door”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Amazingly, the transformations are not primarily based on automation. Instead, the incredible improvements come from modifying policies around the system of work and the policies that control work in process, ensuring that there are effective cross-functional teams, subordinating everything to the constraint, and managing handoffs well.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Trust Wes to say what people are thinking but are too smart to actually say aloud.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“There’s a chain of command: gripes go up, not down.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“never fear conflict, never be afraid to tell the truth, and never be afraid to say what I really think.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Repetition, especially for things that require teamwork, creates trust and transparency.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We’re putting in checklists everywhere, especially when we do handoffs within the team. It’s really making a difference. Error rates are way down.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“your colleague tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was voluntary. But when someone else tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was mandatory.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“if your colleague tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was voluntary. But when someone else tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was mandatory.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Murphy does exist, so you’ll always have unplanned work, but it must be handled efficiently.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“three of the four categories of work: business projects, internal projects, and changes.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote his seminal book, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, in 1984. It’s a Socratic novel about Alex Rogo, a plant manager who must fix his cost and due date issues in ninety days, or his plant will be shut down.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’m about to ask what he means by an “Allspaw,” when he just waves my question away.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“CFO GOALS Health of company Revenue Market share Average order size Profitability Return on assets Health of Finance Order to cash cycle Accounts receivable Accurate and timely financial reporting Borrowing costs”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Once you figure this out, young Bill, you will be well on your way toward understanding the Three Ways,” he says. “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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“But problems, like dog poop left in the rain, rarely get better just by ignoring them.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Goldratt taught us that in most plants, there are a very small number of resources, whether it’s men, machines, or materials, that dictates the output of the entire system. We call this the constraint—or bottleneck. Either term works. Whatever you call it, until you create a trusted system to manage the flow of work to the constraint, the constraint is constantly wasted, which means that the constraint is likely being drastically underutilized. “That means you’re not delivering to the business the full capacity available to you. It also likely means that you’re not paying down technical debt, so your problems and amount of unplanned work continues to increase over time,” he says. He continues, “You’ve identified this Brent person as a constraint to restore service. Trust me, you’ll find that he constrains many other important flows of work, as well.” I try to interrupt to ask a question, but he continues headlong, “There are five focusing steps which Goldratt describes in The Goal: Step 1 is to identify the constraint. You’ve done that, so congratulations. Keep challenging yourself to really make sure that’s your organizational constraint, because if you’re wrong, nothing you do will matter. Remember, any improvement not made at the constraint is just an illusion, yes? “Step 2 is to exploit the constraint,” he continues. “In other words, make sure that the constraint is not allowed to waste any time. Ever. It should never be waiting on any other resource for anything, and it should always be working on the highest priority commitment the IT Operations organization has made to the rest of the enterprise. Always.” I hear him say encouragingly, “You’ve done a good job exploiting the constraint on several fronts. You’ve reduced reliance on Brent for unplanned work and outages. You’ve even started to figure out how to exploit Brent better for the three other types of work: business and IT projects and changes. Remember, unplanned work kills your ability to do planned work, so you must always do whatever it takes to eradicate it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win