The Phoenix Project §
Highlights §
- “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.” (Location 1388)
- “Likewise,” I say emphatically. I look at my watch. It’s 1:20 p.m. It’s time to head (Location 2423)
- The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt. (Location 2603)
- “Sensei Goldratt taught us that in most plants, there are a very small number of resources, whether it’s men, machines, or materials, that dictates the output of the entire system. We call this the constraint—or bottleneck. Either term works. Whatever you call it, until you create a trusted system to manage the flow of work to the constraint, the constraint is constantly wasted, which means that the constraint is likely being drastically underutilized. (Location 2605)
- “That means you’re not delivering to the business the full capacity available to you. It also likely means that you’re not paying down technical debt, so your problems and amount of unplanned work continues to increase over time,” he says. He continues, “You’ve identified this Brent person as a constraint to restore service. Trust me, you’ll find that he constrains many other important flows of work, as well.” (Location 2608)
- “There are five focusing steps which Sensei Goldratt describes in The Goal: Step 1 is to identify the constraint. You’ve done that, so congratulations. Keep challenging yourself to really make sure that’s your organizational constraint, because if you’re wrong, nothing you do will matter. Remember, any improvement not made at the constraint is just an illusion, yes? (Location 2612)
- “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.” I hear him say encouragingly, “You’ve done a good job exploiting the constraint on several fronts. (Location 2615)
- unplanned work kills your ability to do planned work, so you must always do whatever it takes to eradicate it. (Location 2621)
- Step 3, which is to subordinate the constraint. In the Theory of Constraints, this is typically implemented by something called Drum-Buffer-Rope. In The Goal, the main character, Alex, learns about this when he discovers that Herbie, the slowest Boy Scout in the troop, actually dictates the entire group’s marching pace. Alex moved Herbie to the front of the line to prevent kids from going on too far ahead. Later at Alex’s plant, he started to release all work in accordance to the rate it could be consumed by the heat treat ovens, which was his plant’s bottleneck. That was his real-life Herbie.” (Location 2623)
- Remember, it goes beyond reducing wip. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. (Location 2647)
- 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.” (Location 2649)
- outcomes are what matter—not the process, not controls, or, for that matter, what work you complete.” (Location 2650)
- great team doesn’t mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists. (Location 2907)
- Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. (Location 2909)
- ‘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.” “As (Location 3093)
- “Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. (Location 3103)
- “every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures. Suppose (Location 3344)
- ‘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. (Location 3404)
- the purple cards are the changes supporting one of the top five business projects, otherwise, they’re yellow. The green cards are for internal it improvement projects, and we’re experimenting with allocating twenty percent of our cycles just for those, (Location 3685)
- “The pink sticky notes indicate the cards that are blocked somehow, which we’re therefore reviewing twice a day. (Location 3688)
- “As part of the First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that it operates in. W. Edwards Deming called this ‘appreciation for the system.’ When it comes to it, you face two difficulties: On the one hand, in Dick’s second slide, you now see that there are organizational commitments that it is responsible for helping uphold and protect that no one has verbalized precisely yet. On the other hand, John has discovered that some it controls he holds near and dear aren’t needed, because other parts of the organization are adequately mitigating those risks. (Location 4068)
- We can outsource the work but not the responsibility.” (Location 4383)
- It seems to me that if anyone is managing it without talking about the Three Ways, they are managing it on dangerously faulty assumptions. (Location 4453)
- manufacturing plant is a system. The raw materials start on one side, and a million things need to go just right in order for it to leave as finished goods as scheduled out the other side. Everything works together. If any work center is warring with the other work centers, especially if Manufacturing is at war with Engineering, every inch of progress will be a struggle.” (Location 4698)
- “You’ve got to stop thinking like a work center supervisor. You need to think bigger, like a plant manager. Or better yet, think like the person who designed this manufacturing plant and all of the processes it relies upon. They look at the entire flow of work, identify where the constraints are, and use every possible technology and bit of process knowledge they have to ensure work is performed effectively and efficiently. They harness their ‘inner-Allspaw.’” (Location 4701)
- Dev and Ops working together, along with qa and the business, are a super-tribe that can achieve amazing things. They also knew that until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it’s merely wip stuck in the system. He kept reducing the batch size, enabling fast feature flow. In part, he did this by ensuring environments were always available when they were needed. He automated the build and deployment process, recognizing that infrastructure could be treated as code, just like the application that Development ships. That enabled him to create a one-step environment creation and deploy procedure, just like we figured out a way to do one-step painting and curing. (Location 4751)
- deployment pipeline. That’s your entire value stream from code check-in to production. That’s not an art. That’s production. You need to get everything in version control. Everything. Not just the code, but everything required to build the environment. (Location 4762)
- “You’ve helped me see that it is not merely a department. Instead, it’s pervasive, like electricity. It’s a skill, like being able to read or do math. Here at Parts Unlimited, we don’t have a centralized reading or math department—we expect everyone we hire to have some mastery of it. Understanding what technology can and can’t do has become a core competency that every part of this business must have. (Location 5337)
- If any of my business managers are leading a team or a project without that skill, they will fail.” (Location 5340)
- “I’ve long believed that to effectively manage it is not only a critical competency but a significant predictor of company performance,” (Location 5412)
- “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr” was presented by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, (Location 5470)
- This nearly universal problem led to chronic underperformance throughout the entire technology value stream, which included Development, Operations, and Information Security. (Location 5476)
- it led to chronic underperformance of the organization these technologists all served. (Location 5478)
- Eliyahu Goldratt did in The Goal, (Location 5484)
- Goal helped many of us have a giant and meaningful “aha” moment. It has been credited for helping make Lean manufacturing principles (Location 5485)
- audiobook Beyond the Goal, which was released twenty-one years after The (Location 5495)
- delightful and startling blog posts I’ve read about The Phoenix Project was by Dave Lutz, (Location 5525)
- Whether we are a John, a Brent, a Wes, a Patty, or a Bill, when we’re trapped in a system that prevents us from succeeding, our job becomes thankless, reinforces a feeling of powerlessness, and we feel like we are trapped in a system that preordains failure. And worse, the nature of technical debt that is not paid down ensures that the system gets worse over time, regardless of how hard we try. (Location 5553)
- The mission at hand is how we can elevate their productivity so that they’re as productive as the high performers. We know through more than four years of State of DevOps Reports conducted by Puppet that high perfomers are two to three orders of magnitude more productive than their peers. In my mind, helping everyone reach this level of high performace will create trillions of dollars of economic value per year and is where the next surge of productivity will come from. (Location 5578)
- In our conversations together, we talked about how DevOps is inevitable, inexorable, and remorseless, and how DevOps is incredibly disruptive to the technology sector, to the technology field, and for anyone in technology. (Location 5586)
- one of the earliest findings was that boundary-spanning between the different functional groups of IT Operations, Information Security, and Development was critical to success. (Location 5653)
- ITIL or ITSM (IT Service Management), (Location 5725)
- ITIL has broadly influenced multiple generations of Ops practitioners, including one of the co-authors, and is an ever-evolving library of practices intended to codify the processes and practices that underpin world-class IT Operations, spanning service strategy, design, and support. (Location 5725)