Quotes from Gene Kim

do we work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work?

The key thing we should care about is not the form, but the outcomes: deployments should be low-risk, push-button events we can perform on demand.

High touch marketing requires high tech. But if there's so many of us assigned to these Marketing projects,

The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. Reflect upon what the Toyota Andon cord teaches us about how we must elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself.

As someone wise once told me, 'Messiahs are good, but scripture is better.

Before, I was merely worried that it Operations was under attack by Development, Information Security, Audit, and the business. Now, I'm starting to realize that my primary managers seem to be at war with each other, as well. What will it take for us to all get along?

You may recognize them as rigid project plans, inflexible procurement processes, powerful architecture review boards, infrequent release schedules, lengthy approval processes, strict separation of duties …

the Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they willing to pay us for it or is it only of value to our functional silo?

There's a chain of command: gripes go up, not down.

When r&d capital is locked up as wip for more than a year, not returning cash back to the business, it becomes almost impossible to pay back the business,

We all know we need to change how QA does testing, but the best place to start is by changing how Dev does testing.

Like all engineers, she secretly loves hearing disaster stories … as long as she doesn't have the starring role.

Patrick Debois was not there, but was so excited by Allspaw and Hammond's idea that he created the first DevOpsDays in Ghent, Belgium, (where he lived) in 2009. There the term "DevOps" was coined.

By adding the expertise of QA, IT Operations, and Infosec into delivery teams and automated self-service tools and platforms, teams are able to use that expertise in their daily work without being dependent on other teams.

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.

Furthermore, integrating the objectives of QA and Operations into everyone's daily work reduces firefighting, hardship, and toil, while making people more productive and increasing joy in the work we do. We not only improve outcomes, but our organization is better able to win in the marketplace.

A developer jamming in an urgent change so he could go on vacation—possibly as part of some urgent project being driven by John Pesche, our Chief Information Security Officer. 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.

Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood. This

three of the four categories of work: business projects, internal projects, and changes.

Amazingly, the transformations are not primarily based on automation. Instead, the incredible improvements come from modifying policies around the system of work and the policies that control work in process, ensuring that there are effective cross-functional teams, subordinating everything to the constraint, and managing handoffs well.

Maxine remembers what it felt like to be the patient advocate for her dad, doing whatever it took to get him through the healthcare system. Now, she recommits herself to doing whatever it takes to get her teams through the company bureaucracies—the Data Hub team's sense of mission and urgency deserve no less. Relentless optimism, she reminds herself.

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. The best way to make sure something doesn't get done is to have them in the room.

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.

Who's been calling you, and what do they want?" I ask, frowning. "Usually it's other it people who are having problems fixing something," he replies, rolling his eyes. "When something goes down, I'm apparently the only person who knows where to go looking.