The Phoenix Project Quotes

“we are not talking to one another about what changes we’re planning or implementing. This is not acceptable.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“knowing is always better than not knowing. Keep”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“makes me angry when we need to make some heroic, diving catch because of someone else’s lack of planning.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“If I fail, I’ll try to make sure it’s in a new and novel way.”
― 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,”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Step 2 is to exploit the constraint,” he continues. “In other words, make sure that the constraint is not allowed to waste any time. Ever. It should never be waiting on any other resource for anything, and it should always be working on the highest priority commitment the IT Operations organization has made to the rest of the enterprise. Always.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“David J. Anderson’s book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business; it’s”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. This”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You can’t just throw the pig over the wall to us, and”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“For the last decade, like clockwork, new CIOs would come and go every two years. They stay just long enough to understand the acronyms, learn where the bathrooms are, implement a bunch of programs and initiatives to upset the apple cart, and then they’re gone. CIO stands for “Career Is Over.” And VPs of IT Operations don’t last much longer.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Christopher Little states, “If there’s anything that all horses [enterprise IT organizations] hate, it’s hearing stories about unicorns [DevOps shops]. Which is strange, because horses and unicorns are probably the same species. Unicorns are just horses with horns.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Why Do DevOps? The competitive advantage this capability creates is enormous, enabling faster feature time to market, increased customer satisfaction, market share, employee productivity, and happiness, as well as allowing organizations to win in the marketplace. Why?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Instead, code is only “done” when it has been fully tested and is operating in production as designed. (Note”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“DevOps shows how we optimize the IT value stream, converting business needs into capabilities and services that provide value for our customers.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“In hindsight, we now know that WIP is one of the root causes for chronic due-date problems, quality issues, and expediters having to rejuggle priorities every day. It’s”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“which is to subordinate the constraint. In the Theory of Constraints, this is typically implemented by something called Drum-Buffer-Rope. In”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“As someone wise once told me, ‘Messiahs are good, but scripture is better.”
― 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”
― 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. 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.”
― 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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Completely disoriented, I look around and realize that I’m at work and that I must have fallen asleep while waiting for the Phoenix status meeting to start. I sneak a peek at my watch. 11:04 a.m.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Just as important as throttling the release of work is managing the handoffs. The wait time for a given resource is the percentage that resource is busy, divided by the percentage that resource is idle. So, if a resource is fifty percent utilized, the wait time is 50/50, or 1 unit. If the resource is ninety percent utilized, the wait time is 90/10, or nine times longer. And if the resource is ninety-nine percent utilized?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Auditors have friends?”
― 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. The results are never pretty. Usually, the software product is so unstable and unusable that even the people who were screaming for it end up saying that it’s not worth shipping. And it’s always IT Operations who still has to stay up all night, rebooting servers hourly to compensate for crappy code, doing whatever heroics are required to hide from the rest of the world just how bad things really are.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We should have done this a long time ago. We bump up the priorities of things all the time, but we never really know what just got bumped down. That is, until someone screams at us, demanding to know why we haven’t delivered something.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“outcomes are what matter—not the process, not controls, or, for that matter, what work you complete.”
― 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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“IT is not just a department. IT is a competency that we need to gain as an entire company.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Our auditors, who I’ve long believed are a force for justice and objectivity, are crapping on me, too?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win