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.

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.”

That by halting all work except for Phoenix, we’ll reduce the amount of WIP in IT, and that this will somehow improve due-date performance?

“Work wouldn’t complete on time, because Brent can only be at one work center at a time,” I say. Enthusiastically, I continue, “That’s exactly what’s happening with us. I know that for a bunch of our planned changes, work can’t even start if Brent isn’t on hand. When that happens, we’ll escalate to Brent, telling him to drop whatever he’s doing, so some other work center can get going.

“Work center: machine, man, method, measure.”

“You’re standardizing Brent’s work so that other people can execute it.

“Well, to be more accurate, you’re actually building a bill of resources. That’s the bill of materials along with the list of the required work centers and the routing. Once you have that, along with the work orders and your resources, you’ll finally be able to get a handle on what your capacity and demand is. This is what will enable you to finally know whether you can accept new work and then actually be able to schedule the 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.

Studies have shown that 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.”

The First Way is all about controlling the flow of work from Development to IT Operations.

Second Way, creating constant feedback loops from IT Operations back into Development, designing quality into the product at the earliest stages.

you need to automate the entire environment creation process. You need a deployment pipeline where you can create test and production environments, and then deploy code into them, entirely on-demand. That’s how you reduce your setup times and eliminate errors, so you can finally match whatever rate of change Development sets the tempo at.”

Get humans out of the deployment business.

“Stop focusing on the deployment target rate. Business agility is not just about raw speed. It’s about how good you are at detecting and responding to changes in the market and being able to take larger and more calculated risks.