Quotes from Gene Kim

What that graph says is that 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.

we are all lifelong learners who must take risks in our daily work.

I want to bring back the days when a developer could actually create value for someone who cares, easily and quickly," Cranky Dave says. "I want to build and maintain something for the long haul, instead of shipping the 'feature of the day' and dragging all this technical debt around.

handing me a Post-it note with all of Dick's contact information. Office location, phone numbers,

CIO stands for "Career Is Over." And VPs of IT Operations don't last much longer.

developers should be able to understand and update the code of a service without knowing anything about the internals of its peer services. Services

get enough seniority to get good things done but to keep your head low enough to avoid the political battles that make you inherently vulnerable.

This is all just corporate theater. I don't like it but accept it for what it is.

But in reality, when developers work, they're usually staring at the screen, deep in concentration, trying to understand what the code does so they can safely and surgically change it without breaking something else as an unintended side-effect, especially if they're working on something mission-critical

The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.

we can only win by innovating and understanding our customers, which we can only do by mastering data.

For example, high performance with a functional-oriented and centralized Operations group is possible, as long as service teams get what they need from Operations reliably and quickly (ideally on demand) and vice-versa. Many

Services interact with their peers strictly through APIs and thus don't share data structures, database schemata, or other internal representations of objects. Bounded

How can we manage production if we don't know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are?

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.

Mike Rother observed in Toyota Kata that in the absence of improvements, processes don't stay the same—due to chaos and entropy, processes actually degrade over time.

You just want a list of organizational commitments for our key resources, with a one-liner on what they're working on and how long it will take.

want each group to write down every change they're planning, one change per index card. I want three pieces of information: who is planning the change, the system being changed, and a one-sentence summary.

the part about the product manager not showing up for the demo pisses her off. What a disrespectful thing to do to engineers who built what you asked them to.

change' is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.

why does everything feel like I'm dealing with a government bureaucracy or an uncaring vendor? Maxine ponders. Maybe it's because when friends do favors for friends, we don't require them to open a ticket first.

But that's like throwing gasoline on the fire. Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn't crashing production systems, and I'll show you one who can't fog a mirror.

You probably don't even see when work is committed to your organization. And if you can't see it, you can't manage it—let alone organize it, sequence it, and have any assurance that your resources can complete it.

To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy." I had laughed at those words at the time, but over the years, I've realized that having people give you honest feedback is a rare gift.