Quotes from Gene Kim

Psychological safety slips away so easily, like when the leader micromanages, can't say 'I don't know,' or acts like a know-it-all, pompous jackass. And it's not just leaders, it's also how one's peers behave.

You know what your problem is?" Erik says, pointing a finger at John. "You never see the end-to-end business process, so I guarantee you that many of the controls you want to put in aren't even necessary.

I could wave this magic wand, I would change this step. Instead of getting source code or compiled code from Dev through source control, I want packaged code that's ready to be deployed.

my job is very simple: listen, do whatever you need me to do to help make you successful, and remove any obstacles in your way.

Chuck Rossi, Director of Release Engineering at Facebook, described, "All the code supporting every feature we're planning to launch over the next six months has already been deployed onto our production servers. All we need to do is turn it on.

By removing blame, you remove fear; by removing fear, you enable honesty; and honesty enables prevention.

We're like the Bates Motel of changes," I say in disbelief. "Changes go in but never come out. Within a month, we'll have thousands of changes that we'll be carrying around, all competing to get implemented.

which is to subordinate the constraint. In the Theory of Constraints, this is typically implemented by something called Drum-Buffer-Rope. In

When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge.

I've figured out that the trick to a long career in IT Operations management is to 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.

our goal is to create fast feedback and fast forward loops wherever work is performed, at all stages of the technology value stream, encompassing Product Management, Development, QA, Infosec, and Operations. This

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

Nothing unifies people better than complaining about it.

This includes the creation of automated build, integration, and test processes so that we can immediately detect when a change has been introduced that takes us out of a correctly functioning and deployable state.

We also create pervasive telemetry so we can see how all our system components are operating in the production environment, so that we can quickly detect when they are not operating as expected. Telemetry

Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they're in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license."†

how we organize our teams has a powerful effect on the software we produce, as well as our resulting architectural and production outcomes. In

Feedback loops not only enable quick detection and recovery of problems, they also inform us on how to prevent these problems from occurring again in the future. Doing this increases the quality and safety of our system of work, and creates organizational learning.

build ever-deeper knowledge about how to manage the systems for doing our work, converting inevitable up-front ignorance into knowledge.

Done poorly, Conway's Law will prevent teams from working safely and independently; instead, they will be tightly-coupled together, all waiting on each other for work to be done, with even small changes creating potentially global, catastrophic consequences.

In the DevOps ideal, developers receive fast, constant feedback on their work, which enables them to quickly and independently implement, integrate, and validate their code, and have the code deployed into the production environment (either

the %C/A can be obtained by asking downstream customers what percentage of the time they receive work that is 'usable as is,' meaning that they can do their work without having to correct the information that was provided, add missing information that should have been supplied, or clarify information that should have and could have been clearer.

By seeing problems as they occur and swarming them until effective countermeasures are in place, we continually shorten and amplify our feedback loops, a core tenet of virtually all modern process improvement methodologies. This maximizes the opportunities for our organization to learn and improve.

the Fourth Ideal of Psychological Safety. No one will take risks, experiment, or innovate in a culture of fear, where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news,