The Phoenix Project Quotes

“How can we manage production if we don’t know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We make our system of work safer by creating fast, frequent, high quality information flow throughout our value stream and our organization, which includes feedback and feedforward loops. This allows us to detect and remediate problems while they are smaller, cheaper, and easier to fix; avert problems before they cause catastrophe; and create organizational learning that we integrate into future work. When failures and accidents occur, we treat them as opportunities for learning, as opposed to a cause for punishment and blame.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We increase flow by making work visible, by reducing batch sizes and intervals of work, and by building quality in, preventing defects from being passed to downstream work centers.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent! Can’t we do anything without him? Look at us! We’re trying to have a management discussion about commitments and resources, and all we do is talk about one guy! I don’t care how talented he is. If you’re telling me that our organization can’t do anything without him, we’ve got a big problem.” Wes”
― 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”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“How in the hell do you support and secure something that’s written in Microsoft Access? When”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’m starting to associate the smell of pizza with the futility of a death march.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“There should be absolutely no way that the Dev and QA environments don’t match the production environment.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve seen this movie before. The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“What got worked on was based on who yelled the loudest or most often, who could engineer the best side deals with the expediters, or who could get the ear of the highest ranking executive.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. He writes that in order to have mutual trust, you need to be vulnerable.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“He saw a presentation given by John Allspaw and his colleague Paul Hammond that flipped the world on its head. Allspaw and Hammond ran the IT Operations and Engineering groups at Flickr. Instead of fighting like cats and dogs, they talked about how they were working together to routinely do ten deploys a day! This is in a world when most IT organizations”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“It’s the it capacity death spiral.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You get what you design for.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“Information Security is always flashing their badges at people and

making urgent demands, regardless of the consequences to the rest of the organization, which is why we don’t invite them to many meetings. e best way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to have them in the room. ey’re always coming up with a million reasons why anything we

do will create a security hole that alien space-hackers will exploit to pil-lage our entire organization and steal all our code, intellectual property, credit card numbers, and pictures of our loved ones. ese are poten-tially valid risks, but I oen can’t connect the dots between their shrill, hysterical, and self-righteous demands and actually improving the de-

fensibility of our environment.”
― Gene Kim bestselling author of The Phoenix Project The Unicorn Project and Wiring, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Show me a developer who isn’t crashing production systems, and I’ll show you one who can’t fog a mirror.”
― Gene Kim bestselling author of The Phoenix Project The Unicorn Project and Wiring, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Myth—DevOps is Just “Infrastructure as Code” or Automation: While many of the DevOps patterns shown in this book require automation, DevOps also requires cultural norms and an architecture that allows for the shared goals to be achieved throughout the IT value stream. This goes far beyond just automation.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You know the saying, right? The way you can tell a vendor is lying is when their lips are moving.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Old habits die hard.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Rest assured that we understand the urgency of the situation and that you’ll be apprised of how it’s going as soon as I find out myself.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“a deployment pipeline. That’s your entire value stream from code check-in to production. That’s not an art. That’s production. You need to get everything in version control. Everything. Not just the code, but everything required to build the environment. Then you need to automate the entire environment creation process. You need a deployment pipeline where you can create test and production environments, and then deploy code into them, entirely on-demand.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“the four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win