The Phoenix Project Quotes

“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“A great team doesn’t mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent. Can everything really be that important?”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“We need to create a culture that reinforces the value of taking risks and learning from failure and the need for repetition and practice to create mastery.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it’s merely WIP stuck in the system.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“repetition creates habits, and habits are what enable mastery.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“CIO stands for “Career Is Over.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“a ‘change’ is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“You get what you design for. Chester, your peer in Development, is spending all his cycles on features, instead of stability, security, scalability, manageability, operability, continuity, and all those other beautiful ’itties.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Remember, it goes beyond reducing WIP. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“If you can’t out-experiment and beat your competitors in time to market and agility, you are sunk. Features are always a gamble. If you’re lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits. So the faster you can get those features to market and test them, the better off you’ll be. Incidentally, you also pay back the business faster for the use of capital, which means the business starts making money faster, too.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“we’re hearing more lately: something called “DevOps.” Maybe everyone attending this party is a form of DevOps, but I suspect it’s something much more than that. It’s Product Management, Development, IT Operations, and even Information Security all working together and supporting one another.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“I’ve learned that while the finance goals are important, they’re not the most important. Finance can hit all our objectives, and the company still can fail. After all, the best accounts receivables team on the planet can’t save us if we’re in the wrong market with the wrong product strategy with an R&D team that can’t deliver.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Unplanned work is not free. Quite the opposite. It's very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of Planned work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Business agility is not just about raw speed. It’s about how good you are at detecting and responding to changes in the market and being able to take larger and more calculated risks.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win