The Phoenix Project Quotes

“Patty thinks for a moment, “It’s strange. Even though we have so much data on projects, changes, and tickets, we’ve never organized and linked them all together this way before.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I say assertively, “Give me three lists. One that requires Brent work, one that increases Brent’s throughput, and the last one is everything else. Identify the top projects on each list. Don’t spend too much time ordering them—I don’t want us spending days arguing. The most important list is the second one. We need to keep Brent’s capacity up by reducing the amount of unplanned work that hits him.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Wes says defensively, “We all try to juggle the competing priorities as best as we can. That’s life, right? Priorities change.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You know what your problem is?” Erik says, pointing a finger at John. “You never see the end-to-end business process, so I guarantee you that many of the controls you want to put in aren’t even necessary.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Erik then grows still and merely says, “To fix your problem, you need to do a lot more than just learning how to say no. That’s the tip of the iceberg.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“feedback from right-to-left at all stages of the value stream, amplifying it to ensure that we can prevent problems from happening again or enable faster detection and recovery.”
― 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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“A critical part of the Second Way is making wait times visible, so you know when your work spends days sitting in someone’s queue—or worse, when work has to go backward, because it doesn’t have all the parts or requires rework.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours. And if you want to create a genuine culture of improvement, you must create those habits.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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

“Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it. Like Phoenix.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I listen to Wes and Patty brainstorm ideas to reduce yet another dependency on Brent when something starts to bother me. Erik called WIP, or work in process, the “silent killer,” and that inability to control WIP on the plant floor was one of the root causes for chronic due-date problems and quality issues.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Because they’re likely art or music majors, not people with a technology background, they’ll publicly promise the impossible and IT will have to figure out how to deliver.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Features are always a gamble. If you’re lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“They also knew that until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it’s merely WIP stuck in the system.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“After a couple of tries, I end up with a graph that looks like this: I tell them what Erik told me at MRP-8, about how wait times depend upon resource utilization. “The wait time is the ‘percentage of time busy’ divided by the ‘percentage of time idle.’ In other words, if a resource is fifty percent busy, then it’s fifty percent idle. The wait time is fifty percent divided by fifty percent, so one unit of time. Let’s call it one hour. So, on average, our task would wait in the queue for one hour before it gets worked. “On the other hand, if a resource is ninety percent busy, the wait time is ‘ninety percent divided by ten percent’, or nine hours. In”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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

“If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong. Dead wrong,” he says. “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

“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

“Was there an outage I didn’t respond to quickly enough? As an IT Operations guy, the career-ending outage is the joke my peers and I tell one another daily.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“My heart lurches as all the implications sink in. 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

“We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just do!”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“When everyone is conditioned to believe that no isn’t an acceptable answer, we all just became compliant order takers, blindly marching down a doomed path. I”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“any improvement not made at the constraint is just an illusion, yes?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“A fellow NCO in the Marines once told me that his priorities were the following: provider, parent, spouse, and change agent. In that order.”
― 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”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

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

“Something is really screwy in the world when I’m finding reasons to thank Development and Security in the same day.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“He sounded just like that dude from Pulp Fiction. He even quoted the line about the day of reckoning and striking people down with great vengeance and furious anger.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We have even managed to turn into a Twitter trending topic. All”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win