Quotes from Gene Kim

Are we playing to win and to establish the technical supremacy we need to keep up with what the business needs, or do we just keep limping along, shackled to things built decades ago, and tell our business leadership to throw in the towel and stop having good ideas?

One goal is that our tooling reinforces that Development and Operations not only have shared goals but have a common backlog of work, ideally stored in a common work system and using a shared vocabulary, so that work can be prioritized globally.

As Tom Limoncelli describes, "When I was at Google, we had one official compiled language, one official scripting language, and one official UI language. Yes, other languages were supported in some way or another, but sticking with 'the big three' meant support libraries, tools, and an easier way to find collaborators.

A fellow NCO in the Marines once told me that his priorities were the following: provider, parent, spouse, and change agent. In that order.

Ward Cunningham in 2003. He said, 'technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.

You've helped me see that IT is not merely a department. Instead, it's pervasive, like electricity. It's a skill, like being able to read or do math.

As measured by employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). This is a significant finding, as research has shown that "companies with highly engaged workers grew revenues two and a half times as much as those with low engagement levels. And [publicly traded] stocks of companies with a high-trust work environment outperformed market indexes by a factor of three from 1997 through 2011." DevOps Helps

I'm about to ask what he means by an "Allspaw," when he just waves my question away.

where mistakes are routinely punished and scapegoats fired. Punishing failure and "shooting the messenger" only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

I say assertively, "Give me three lists. One that requires Brent work, one that increases Brent's throughput, and the last one is everything else. Identify the top projects on each list. Don't spend too much time ordering them—I don't want us spending days arguing. The most important list is the second one. We need to keep Brent's capacity up by reducing the amount of unplanned work that hits him.

The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, where we make it safe to talk about problems, because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear.

Patty thinks for a moment, "It's strange. Even though we have so much data on projects, changes, and tickets, we've never organized and linked them all together this way before.

You know, we're struggling, too. We've never had so many problems hitting our ship dates. My engineers keep getting pulled off of feature development to handle escalations when things break. And deployments keep taking longer and longer. What used to take ten minutes to deploy starts taking an hour. Then a full day, then an entire weekend, then four days. I've even got some deployments that are now taking over a week to complete.

They also knew that until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it's merely WIP stuck in the system.

how we design our organization dictates how work is performed, and, therefore, the outcomes we achieve. Throughout

In order for a field or discipline to progress and mature, it needs to reach a point where it can thoughtfully reflect on its origins, seek out a diverse set of perspectives on those reflections, and place that synthesis into a context that is useful for how the community pictures the future.

every incident is a learning opportunity, an unplanned investment that was made without our consent.

Incidentally, until you do this, no matter how many more Brents you hire, Brent will always remain your constraint. Anyone you hire will just end up standing around.

What use is it having all these offshore developers building features if we aren't getting to market any faster? We keep lengthening the deployment intervals, so that we can get more features deployed in each batch.

I expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it.

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.

four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.

Features are always a gamble. If you're lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits.

I would recommend to any one who has interest in Dr. Goldratt's work to listen to his audiobook Beyond the Goal, which was released twenty-one years after The Goal. It brilliantly captures in one place his own lifetime of learnings, and synthesizes those learnings into a comprehensible and comprehensive whole.