Quotes from Gene Kim

In the technology value stream, we optimize for downstream work centers by designing for operations, where operational non-functional requirements (e.g., architecture, performance, stability, testability, configurability, and security) are prioritized as highly as user features.

Ah… Now I see it. What can displace planned work? Unplanned work. Of course.

Innovation and learning occur at the edges, not the core. Problems must be solved on the front-lines, where daily work is performed by the world's foremost experts who confront those problems most often.

for those organizations that provided a stock ticker symbol, we found that high performers had 50% higher market capitalization growth over three years. They also had higher employee job satisfaction, lower rates of employee burnout, and their employees were 2.2 times more likely to recommend their organization to friends as a great place to work.

Lean defines two types of customers that we must design for: the external customer (who most likely pays for the service we are delivering) and the internal customer (who receives and processes the work immediately after us). According to Lean, our most important customer is our next step downstream. Optimizing our work for them requires that we have empathy for their problems in order to better identify the design problems that prevent fast and smooth flow.

To even get feedback from our integration process would require twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

knowing is always better than not knowing. Keep

Our auditors, who I've long believed are a force for justice and objectivity, are crapping on me, too?

Some of the wisest auditors say that there are only three internal control objectives: to gain assurance for reliability of financial reporting, compliance with laws and regulations, and efficiency and effectiveness of operations. That's it. What you and John are talking about are just different slides of what is called the 'coso Cube.

When everyone is conditioned to believe that no isn't an acceptable answer, we all just became compliant order takers, blindly marching down a doomed path. I

Get humans out of the deployment business.

because everything is being recorded, we may not need to ask someone else for help in the future—we simply search for it.

the architecture that our services operate within dictates how we test and deploy our code. This

Unplanned work is not free. Quite the opposite. It's very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of Planned work.

We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just do!

This is the reality of operating complex systems; no single person can see the whole system and understand how all the pieces fit together.

You know the saying, right? The way you can tell a vendor is lying is when their lips are moving.

Furthermore, everyone is constantly learning, fostering a hypothesis-driven culture where the scientific method is used to ensure nothing is taken for granted—we do nothing without measuring and treating product development and process improvement as experiments.

However, interrupting technology workers is easy, because the consequences are invisible to almost everyone, even though the negative impact to productivity may be far greater than in manufacturing. For instance, an engineer assigned to multiple projects must switch between tasks, incurring all the costs of having to re-establish context, as well as cognitive rules and goals.

we are not talking to one another about what changes we're planning or implementing. This is not acceptable.

DevOps shows how we optimize the IT value stream, converting business needs into capabilities and services that provide value for our customers.

we need to design our systems so that they are continually creating telemetry, widely

Cagan notes that when organizations do not pay their "20% tax," technical debt will increase to the point where an organization inevitably spends all of its cycles paying down technical debt.

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods.