Quotes from Gene Kim

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.

every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures.

I've seen this movie before. The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

There's a very real cognitive and spiritual burden of having to carry so many unfulfilled promises forever into the future, where anyone can ask at any time "Where is my feature?

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

It's difficult to overstate the enormity of this problem—it affects every organization, independent of the industry we operate in, the size of our organization, whether we are profit or non-profit. Now more than ever, how technology work is managed and performed predicts whether our organizations will win in the marketplace, or even survive.

I'm starting to associate the smell of pizza with the futility of a death march.

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.

Bill Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, quipped that we used to treat servers like pets: "You name them and when they get sick, you nurse them back to health. [Now] servers are [treated] like cattle. You number them and when they get sick, you shoot them.

In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.

There should be absolutely no way that the Dev and QA environments don't match the production environment.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. He writes that in order to have mutual trust, you need to be vulnerable.

What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.

In ten years, I'm certain every COO worth their salt will have come from IT. Any COO who doesn't intimately understand the IT systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.

management hints that the person guilty of committing the error will be punished. They then create more processes and approvals to prevent the error from happening again.

Punishing failure and "shooting the messenger" only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

By relentless and constant experimentation in their daily work, they were able to continually increase capacity, often without adding any new equipment or hiring more people.

Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent! Can't we do anything without him? Look at us! We're trying to have a management discussion about commitments and resources, and all we do is talk about one guy! I don't care how talented he is. If you're telling me that our organization can't do anything without him, we've got a big problem." Wes

It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end.

They read in an airline magazine that they can manage their whole supply chain in the cloud for $499 per year, and suddenly that's the main company initiative.

So much about DevOps is counter intuitive, contrary to common practice, and even controversial. If production deployments are problematic, how on earth can deploying more frequently be a good idea? How can reducing the number of controls actually increase the security of our applications and environments? And can technology really learn anything from manufacturing?

high performers use a disciplined approach to solving problems. This is in contrast to the more common practice of using rumor and hearsay, which can lead to the unfortunate metric of mean time until declared innocent—how quickly can we convince everyone else that we didn't cause the outage. When there is a culture of blame around outages and problems, groups may avoid documenting changes and displaying telemetry where everyone can see them to avoid being blamed for outages.

How in the hell do you support and secure something that's written in Microsoft Access? When

During the meeting and the subsequent resolution, we should explicitly disallow the phrases "would have" or "could have," as they are counterfactual statements that result from our human tendency to create possible alternatives to events that have already occurred.