The Phoenix Project Quotes

“Although it’s difficult to see in the moment, the downward spiral is obvious when one takes a step back. We notice that production code deployments are taking ever-longer to complete, moving from minutes to hours to days to weeks. And worse, the deployment outcomes have become even more problematic, that resulting in an ever-increasing number of customer-impacting outages that require more heroics and firefighting in Operations, further depriving them of their ability to pay down technical debt.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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

“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

“Next, we found numerous instances where developers have administrative access to production applications and databases. This violates the required segregation of duty required to prevent risk for fraud.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Screwups like the san failure made us miss a Phoenix deliverable, and now we’re paying for it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“And one of the most critical people who needed to be there wasn’t able to make it, due to escalations. You can probably guess who that is…” I groan. “Brent?” Wes nods, “Yep. He’s the guy we need at those meetings to tell those idiotic developers how things work in the real world and what type of things keep breaking in production. The irony, of course, is that he can’t tell the developers, because he’s too busy repairing the things that are already broken.” He’s right. Unless we can break this cycle, we’ll stay in our terrible downward spiral. Brent needs to work with developers to fix issues at the source so we can stop fighting fires. But Brent can’t attend, because he’s too busy fighting fires.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“Then it hits me. The majority of our marketing projects can’t be done without it. High touch marketing requires high tech. But if there’s so many of us assigned to these Marketing projects, shouldn’t they be coming to us?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We don’t have time to do interrogations every time something goes wrong,” I say, exasperated. “Get me a list of all the changes made in the past, say, three days. Without an accurate timeline, we won’t be able to establish cause and effect, and we’ll probably end up causing another outage.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“changes are another category of work”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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

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

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

“All the firefighting displaced all the planned work, both projects and changes”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I had called Erik briefly to tell him that I had discovered 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

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

“It’s like the free puppy,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Just how many times can you throw out everything you know to keep up with the latest new-fangled trend”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Technology keeps changing faster and faster, and it’s nearly impossible to keep up anymore.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“No, lack of competence is the enemy of good”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“FUBAR, meaning “fucked up beyond all recognition.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“For these types of changes, I’ll have my staff generate some reports on the changes’ success rates and any associated downtime. This will help the business make more informed decisions around the changes.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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

“Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“work in process’ or ‘inventory”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You probably don’t even see when work is committed to your organization. And if you can’t see it, you can’t manage it—let alone organize it, sequence it, and have any assurance that your resources can complete it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“change’ is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“want each group to write down every change they’re planning, one change per index card. I want three pieces of information: who is planning the change, the system being changed, and a one-sentence summary.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You just want a list of organizational commitments for our key resources, with a one-liner on what they’re working on and how long it will take.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win