Quotes from Gene Kim

Rest assured that we understand the urgency of the situation and that you'll be apprised of how it's going as soon as I find out myself.

However, we must remind everyone that improvement of daily work is more important than daily work itself, and that all teams must have dedicated capacity for this (e.g., reserving 20% of all cycles for improvement work, scheduling one day per week or one week per month, etc.). Without doing this, the productivity of the team will almost certainly grind to a halt under the weight of its own technical and process debt.

It is virtually impossible to make any business decision that doesn't result in at least one IT change.

DevOps practices can be made compatible with ITIL process. However, to support the shorter lead times and higher deployment frequencies associated with DevOps, many areas of the ITIL processes become fully automated, solving many problems associated with the configuration and release management processes (e.g., keeping the configuration management database and definitive software libraries up to date).

When people are trapped in this downward spiral for years, especially those who are downstream of Development, they often feel stuck in a system that pre-ordains failure and leaves them powerless to change the outcomes. This powerlessness is often followed by burnout, with the associated feelings of fatigue, cynicism, and even hopelessness and despair.

In addition to the human suffering that comes with the current way of working, the opportunity cost of the value that we could be creating is staggering—the authors believe that we are missing out on approximately $2.6 trillion of value creation per year, which is, at the time of this writing, equivalent to the annual economic output of France, the sixth-largest economy in the world.

on what basis do we decide whether we can accept a new project.

A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents are shown in the same work systems as development work, it will be obvious when ongoing incidents should halt other work, especially when we have a kanban board.

Kanban boards are an ideal tool to create visibility, and visibility is a key component in properly recognizing and integrating Ops work into all the relevant value streams. When we do this well, we achieve market-oriented outcomes, regardless of how we've drawn our organization charts.

Instead of IT Operations doing manual work that comes from work tickets, it enables developer productivity through APIs and self-serviced platforms that create environments, test and deploy code, monitor and display production telemetry, and so forth.

If adopting DevOps could enable us, through better management and increased operational excellence, to halve that waste and redeploy that human potential into something that's five times the value (a modest proposal), we could create $2.6 trillion of value per year.

Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there's little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there's not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So,

Another benefit of having Development and Operations using a shared tool is a unified backlog, where everyone prioritizes improvement projects from a global perspective, selecting

Erik described the relationship between a CEO and a CIO as a dysfunctional marriage. That both sides feel powerless and held hostage by the other.

Even high-profile product and feature releases become routine by using dark launch techniques. Long before the launch date, we put all the required code for the feature into production, invisible to everyone except internal employees and small cohorts of real users, allowing us to test and evolve the feature until it achieves the desired business goal.

One is that it matters. it is not just a department that I can delegate away. it is smack in the middle of every major company effort we have and is critical to almost every aspect of daily operations.

Frequently, Development will take responsibility for responding to changes in the market, deploying features and changes into production as quickly as possible. IT Operations will take responsibility for providing customers with IT service that is stable, reliable, and secure, making it difficult or even impossible for anyone to introduce production changes that could jeopardize production. Configured this way, Development and IT Operations have diametrically opposed goals and incentives.

Well, now that you mention it…

when something does go wrong, we conduct blameless post-mortems, not to punish anyone, but to better understand what caused the accident and how to prevent it. This

Much of my career has involved rewrites of critical systems. You would think such a thing is easy—just make the new one do what the old one did. Yet they are always much more complex than they seem, and overflowing with risk. The big cut-over date looms, and the pressure is on. While new features (there are always new features) are liked, old stuff has to remain. Even old bugs often need to be added to the rewritten system.

They start making a list: Every developer uses a common build environment. Every developer is supported by a continuous build and integration system. Everyone can run their code in production-like environments. Automated test suites are built to replace manual testing, liberating QA people to do higher value work. Architecture is decoupled to liberate feature teams, so developers can deliver value independently. All the data that teams need is put in easily consumed APIs

Up-front analysis helps us identify the smallest possible piece of work that will usefully achieve a business outcome using

Alarmingly, our most fragile artifacts support either our most important revenue-generating systems or our most critical projects. In other words, the systems most prone to failure are also our most important and are at the epicenter of our most urgent changes. When these changes fail, they jeopardize our most important organizational promises, such as availability to customers, revenue goals, security of customer data, accurate financial reporting, and so forth.

high performers were twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals. And,