Quotes from Gene Kim

feedback from right-to-left at all stages of the value stream, amplifying it to ensure that we can prevent problems from happening again or enable faster detection and recovery.

What use is it having all these offshore developers building features if we aren't getting to market any faster? We

A lot of what drives me and others working in this space is the knowledge that, whatever your constraints, we can always do better, and the desire to help people on their journey.

While the redshirts battle to contain the raging engine fire that is threatening the entire ship, the bridge officers continue to cover their asses,

Remember, outcomes are what matter—not the process, not controls, or, for that matter, what work you complete.

the Third Way focuses on creating a culture of continual learning and experimentation. These

It stands to reason that if it is organized so that it can win, the business wins, too.

In Operations, many of our data sets have what we call 'chi squared' distribution. Using

What these organizations have in common is a high-trust culture that enables all departments to work together effectively, where all work is transparently prioritized and there is sufficient slack in the system to allow high-priority work to be completed quickly. This is, in part, enabled by automated self-service platforms that build quality into the products everyone is building.

Maybe my group being outsourced wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. I've been in software development for virtually my entire career. I'm used to everyone demanding miracles, expecting the impossible, people changing requirements at the last minute, but, after living through this latest nightmare project, I wonder if it might be time for a change…

This kind of service-oriented architecture allows small teams to work on smaller and simpler units of development that each team can deploy independently, quickly, and safely. Shoup notes, "Organizations with these types of architectures, such as Google and Amazon, show how it can impact organizational structures, [creating] flexibility and scalability. These are both organizations with tens of thousands of developers, where small teams can still be incredibly productive.

Over-alerting causes Operations engineers to be woken up in the middle of the night for protracted periods of time, even when there are few actions that they can appropriately take. The

high-performing manufacturing operations require and actively promote learning—instead of work being rigidly defined, the system of work is dynamic, with line workers performing experiments in their daily work to generate new improvements, enabled by rigorous standardization of work procedures and documentation of the results.

In order to be able to know if we are making progress toward our goal, it's essential that everyone in the organization knows the current state of work. There

Brent is very unique. Unicorn needs someone who has the respect of the developers, has enough deep experience with almost every sort of it infrastructure we have, and can describe what the developers need to build so that we can actually manage and operate in production. Those skills are rare, and we don't have anyone else that can rotate into this special role right now.

what's most important is that the information we display is up to date, and that we constantly revise what we measure to make sure it's helping us understand progress toward our current target conditions.

But problems, like dog poop left in the rain, rarely get better just by ignoring them.

It's like the free puppy," I continue. "It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end." Chris cracks up. "Yes, exactly! They'll say, 'The puppy can't quite do everything we need. Can you train it to fly airplanes? It's just a simple matter of coding, right?

A firm-wide, shared source code repository is one of the most powerful mechanisms used to integrate local discoveries across the entire organization.

We also have all the calls going into the service desk, whether it's requests for something new or asking to fix something. But that list will be incomplete, too, because so many people in the business just go to their favorite it person. All that work is completely off the books.

you definitely need to know about constraints because you need to increase flow. Right now, nothing is more important." Erik assumes a lecturing voice as he starts, "You say you learned about plant operations management when you were in business school. I hope as part of your curriculum, you read The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt. If you don't have a copy anymore, get another one.

If there's any time that deserves courage and relentless optimism, it's now,

In his book, he states that the value of having a single repository for an entire organization is so powerful it is difficult to even explain.

Christopher Little states, "If there's anything that all horses [enterprise IT organizations] hate, it's hearing stories about unicorns [DevOps shops]. Which is strange, because horses and unicorns are probably the same species. Unicorns are just horses with horns.