The Phoenix Project Quotes

“you definitely need to know about constraints because you need to increase flow. Right now, nothing is more important.” Erik assumes a lecturing voice as he starts, “You say you learned about plant operations management when you were in business school. I hope as part of your curriculum, you read The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt. If you don’t have a copy anymore, get another one.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I can see that we’re not ready to have this discussion. Until you gain a better understanding of what work is, any conversation we have about controlling work will be totally lost on you. It would be like talking about acrobatics to someone who doesn’t believe in gravity yet. “Rest assured, though,” he says, pointing at the job release desk, “in order to get to where you want to go, eventually you will need to figure out what your equivalent to that desk is. You must figure out how to control the release of work into IT Operations and, more importantly, ensure that your most constrained resources are doing only the work that serves the goal of the entire system, not just one silo.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“keeping the first station busy, and it’s similar to first-in, first-out scheduling. But of course, now everyone knows that 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.” I just stare at him blankly. He continues, “Because of how Mark was releasing work, inventory kept piling up in front of our bottleneck, and jobs were never finished on time. Every day was an emergency. For years, we were awarded Best Customer of the Year from our air freight shipment company, because we were overnighting thousands of pounds of finished goods to angry customers almost every week.” He pauses and then says emphatically, “Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how 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.” He continues, “In our case, our bottleneck was a heat treat oven, just like in Goldratt’s novel, The Goal. We also had paint-curing booths that later became constraints, too. By the time we froze the release of all new jobs, you couldn’t even see the bottleneck work centers because they were surrounded by huge piles of inventory. Even from up here!” Despite myself, I laugh with him. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I can imagine that to Mark, it was anything but obvious. “Look, thanks for the history lesson. But I learned most of this already in business school. I don’t see how this could possibly be relevant to managing IT Operations. IT is not like running a factory.” “Oh, really?” he turns to me, frowning intensely. “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.” I frown. I can’t figure out if he’s trying to convince me of something I already believe or trying to get me to accept an absurd conclusion. “If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“My guys wanted to call it “Cujo” or “Stiletto.” But the developers wanted to call it “Unicorn.” Unicorn? Like rainbows and Care Bears? And against all my expectations, “Unicorn” wins the vote. Developers. I’ll never understand them.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“While we’re dreaming big dreams here, let me say this,” he continues. “In ten years, I’m certain every COO worth their salt will have come from IT. 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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“If we know it’s that prone to crashing, why do we need to change it?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Chester, your peer in Development, is spending all his cycles on features, instead of stability, security, scalability, manageability, operability, continuity, and all those other beautiful ’itties.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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

“She flips to the second page. “The projects seem to fall into the following categories: replacing fragile infrastructure, vendor upgrades, or supporting some internal business requirement. The rest are a hodgepodge of audit and security work, data center upgrade work, and so forth.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“, but as they say, you always have to watch out for the quiet ones. I take a quick shower. I run into the kitchen and grab a couple of sticks of the string cheese our son loves to eat. I take these”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“They’d be responsible for documenting what they learned, and Brent would never be allowed to work on the same problem twice. I’d review each of the issues weekly, and if I find out that Brent worked a problem twice, there will be hell to pay. For both the level 3s and Brent.” I add, “Based on Wes’ story, we shouldn’t even let Brent touch the keyboard. He’s allowed to tell people what to type and shoulder-surf, but under no condition will we allow him to do something that we can’t document afterward. Is that clear?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“In one case, we even found a ticket that Wes put in over ten years ago as a junior engineer, referring to some task for a machine that has been long since decommissioned.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“There are newborn babies dropped off at church doorsteps with more operating instructions than what they’re giving us.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Life in IT is pretty shitty when it’s so misunderstood and mismanaged. It becomes thankless and frustrating as people realize that they are powerless to change the outcome, like an endlessly repeating horror movie. If that’s not damaging to our self-worth as human beings, I don’t know what is. That’s got to change,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“Shaking his head, he continues, “It’s harder than ever to convince the business to do the right thing. They’re like kids in a candy store. They read in an airline magazine that they can manage their whole supply chain in the cloud for $499 per year, and suddenly that’s the main company initiative. When we tell them it’s not actually that easy, and show them what it takes to do it right, they disappear. Where did they go? They’re talking to their Cousin Vinnie or some outsourcing sales guy who promises they can do it in a tenth of the time and cost.” I laugh. “A couple of years ago, someone in Marketing asked my group to support a database reporting tool that one of their summer interns wrote. It was actually pretty brilliant, given that she only had a couple of months to work on it, and then it started being used in daily operations. How in the hell do you support and secure something that’s written in Microsoft Access? When the auditors found out that we couldn’t secure access to all the data, we spent weeks cobbling together something that satisfied them. “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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Mike Rother says that it almost doesn’t matter what you improve, as long as you’re improving something. Why? Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse, which ensures that there is no path to zero errors, zero work-related accidents, and zero loss.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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

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

“We’re like the Bates Motel of changes,” I say in disbelief. “Changes go in but never come out. Within a month, we’ll have thousands of changes that we’ll be carrying around, all competing to get implemented.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“High touch marketing requires high tech. But if there’s so many of us assigned to these Marketing projects,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win