The Phoenix Project Quotes

“I’m pretty sure we don’t do any sort of analysis of capacity and demand before we accept work. Which means we’re always scrambling, having to take shortcuts, which means more fragile applications in production.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Solving any complex business problem requires teamwork, and teamwork requires trust.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security. The two working together gives us means, motive, and opportunity. I’m guessing our ciso probably strong-armed a Development manager to do something, which resulted in a developer doing something else, which broke the payroll run. 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. The best way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to have them in the room. They’re always coming up with a million reasons why anything we do will create a security hole that alien space-hackers will exploit to pillage our entire organization and steal all our code, intellectual property, credit card numbers, and pictures of our loved ones.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We need to focus on the riskiest changes,” I continue. “The 80/20 rule likely applies here: Twenty percent of the changes pose eighty percent of the risk.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Nothing unifies people better than complaining about it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“How can we manage production if we don’t know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are? Suddenly, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t ask these questions on my first day.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts. As Bill said, ‘around and around we go.’ It’s the it capacity death spiral.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“What I want is for it to keep the lights on. It should be like using the toilet. I use the toilet and, hell, I don’t ever worry about it not working. What I don’t want is to have the toilets back up and flood the entire building.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“As Dr. W. Edwards Deming is famously paraphrased, “Learning is not compulsory...neither is survival.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“on what basis do we decide whether we can accept a new project.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Let’s be honest,” Patty says. “Priority 1 is whoever is yelling the loudest, with the tie-breaker being who can escalate to the most senior executive. Except when they’re more subtle. I’ve seen a bunch of my staff always prioritizing a certain manager’s requests, because he takes them out to lunch once a month.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I don't want to be like a seagull, flying in, crapping on people, and then flying away, you know?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Unplanned work is not free. Quite the opposite. It's very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of...planned work!”
― Gene Kim , The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve come across otherwise smart people who are of the mistaken belief that if they hold on to a task, something only they know how to do, it’ll ensure job security. These people are knowledge hoarders. This doesn't work. Everyone is replaceable. No matter how talented they are. Sure it may take longer at first to find out how to do that special task, but it will happen without them.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve come across otherwise smart people who are of the mistaken belief that if they hold on to a task, something only they know how to do, it’ll ensure job security. These people are knowledge hoarders. This doesn't work. Everyone is replaceable. No matter how talented they are. Sure it may take longer at first to find out how to do that special task, but it will happen without them.”
― Kevin Behr, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Unplanned work is not free. Quite the opposite. It's very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of...planned work!”
― Kevin Behr, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Maybe not,” I say. “I’ll tell you what I do know, though. Every time that we let Brent fix something that none of us can replicate, Brent gets a little smarter, and the entire system gets dumber.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“The Phoenix Project is ultimately a book about transformation, and so it is incredibly gratifying to see it being used as an instrument to create transformations in real life as well.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“She looks around at the entire floor. Over a hundred developers are typing away, working on their little piece of the system on their laptops. Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else’s.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“As measured by employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). This is a significant finding, as research has shown that “companies with highly engaged workers grew revenues two and a half times as much as those with low engagement levels. And [publicly traded] stocks of companies with a high-trust work environment outperformed market indexes by a factor of three from 1997 through 2011.” DevOps Helps”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“It’s not a good sign when they’re still attaching parts to the space shuttle at liftoff time.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve also come across otherwise smart [people] who are of the mistaken belief that if they hold on to a task, something only they know how to do, it’ll ensure job security. These people are knowledge Hoarders. This doesn’t work. Everyone is replaceable. No matter how talented they are. Sure it may take longer at first to find out how to do that special task, but it will happen without them.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I would recommend to any one who has interest in Dr. Goldratt’s work to listen to his audiobook Beyond the Goal, which was released twenty-one years after The Goal. It brilliantly captures in one place his own lifetime of learnings, and synthesizes those learnings into a comprehensible and comprehensive whole.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I could wave this magic wand, I would change this step. Instead of getting source code or compiled code from Dev through source control, I want packaged code that’s ready to be deployed.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“two of the three legs of the ‘confidentiality, integrity, and availability triangle’ or cia.” He”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Some of the wisest auditors say that there are only three internal control objectives: to gain assurance for reliability of financial reporting, compliance with laws and regulations, and efficiency and effectiveness of operations. That’s it. What you and John are talking about are just different slides of what is called the ‘coso Cube.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.’ The Third Way is all about ensuring that we’re continually putting tension into the system, so that we’re continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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