The Phoenix Project Quotes

“When r&d capital is locked up as wip for more than a year, not returning cash back to the business, it becomes almost impossible to pay back the business,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We are clueless about what our customers want! We have too much product that will never sell and never enough of the ones that do.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“There were still so many uncertainties. But unlike before, our challenges feel within our ability to understand and conquer. Our goals finally seem achievable. I no longer feel like I am always on my heels, with more and more people piling on, trying to push me over.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You know, deployments are like final assembly in a manufacturing plant. Every flow of work goes through it, and you can’t ship the product without it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Creating and prioritizing work inside a department is hard. Managing work among departments must be at least ten times more difficult.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Incidentally, until you do this, no matter how many more Brents you hire, Brent will always remain your constraint. Anyone you hire will just end up standing around.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Let the inevitable happen, and we’ll see what we can learn from it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“If we single-task on the most important project for two weeks and still aren’t able to make a big dent, then I think we should all find new day jobs.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I need you to say no! We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“To my surprise, Erik interrupts. “Well put, Bill. You’ve just described ‘technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. To do that, you need to know what matters to the achievement of the business objectives, whether it’s projects, operations, strategy, compliance with laws and regulations, security, or whatever.”
― 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. 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

“Ah… Now I see it. What can displace planned work? Unplanned work. Of course.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“What use is it having all these offshore developers building features if we aren’t getting to market any faster? We keep lengthening the deployment intervals, so that we can get more features deployed in each batch.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You know, we’re struggling, too. We’ve never had so many problems hitting our ship dates. My engineers keep getting pulled off of feature development to handle escalations when things break. And deployments keep taking longer and longer. What used to take ten minutes to deploy starts taking an hour. Then a full day, then an entire weekend, then four days. I’ve even got some deployments that are now taking over a week to complete.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.” Chris cracks up. “Yes, exactly! They’ll say, ‘The puppy can’t quite do everything we need. Can you train it to fly airplanes? It’s just a simple matter of coding, right?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Maybe my group being outsourced wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I’ve been in software development for virtually my entire career. I’m used to everyone demanding miracles, expecting the impossible, people changing requirements at the last minute, but, after living through this latest nightmare project, I wonder if it might be time for a change…”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I wince, thinking about how this will tie up even more of our guys, doing menial work that the broken application should be doing. Nothing worries auditors more than direct edits of data without audit trails and proper controls.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’m not suggesting Brent is doing this deliberately, but I wonder whether Brent views all his knowledge as a sort of power. Maybe some part of him is reluctant to give that up. It does put him in this position where he’s virtually impossible to replace.” “Maybe. 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. We’ve got to put an end to that.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Your job as vp of it Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure it service.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. 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

“Before, I was merely worried that it Operations was under attack by Development, Information Security, Audit, and the business. Now, I’m starting to realize that my primary managers seem to be at war with each other, as well. What will it take for us to all get along?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“But, even after two years, all we have is a great process on paper that no one follows and a tool that no one uses. When I pester people to use them, all I get are complaints and excuses.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“What the hell happened in there? How did we get into this position? Does anyone know what’s required from us to support this launch?” “No one has a clue,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. “We haven’t even agreed on how to do the handoff with Development. In the past, they’ve just pointed to a network folder and said, ‘Deploy that.’ 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

“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

“When John agrees, I thank him for his time. “Wait, one more question. Why do you believe that this product didn’t cause the failure? Did you test the change?” There’s a short silence on the phone before John replies, “No, we couldn’t test the change. There’s no test environment. Apparently, you guys requested a budget years ago, but…” I should have known.”
― 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. The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security. The two working together gives us means, motive, and opportunity.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“When I tell him, he looks disgusted. “We spend more money watering the lawns at the manufacturing plants every week! Dick is going to hear from me about this. If he’s not willing to spend money, we may lose orders—even if your project is just insurance so we can collect on all the hard work my sales team does—it’s a no-brainer!”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“everyone needs idle time, or slack time. If no one has slack time, wip gets stuck in the system. Or more specifically, stuck in queues, just waiting.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win