The Phoenix Project

• By instituting a set of cultural norms, processes, and practices, these high performers are achieving breathtaking performance.
• Everyone in the value stream shares a culture that not only values each other's time and contributions but also relentlessly injects pressure into the system of work to enable organizational learning and improvement.
• Instead of approval and compliance processes, the hallmark of a low-trust, command-and-control management culture, we rely on peer review to ensure that everyone has confidence in the quality of their code.
• Converting business needs into capabilities and services. 
• Small teams operating with high trust combined with small batch sizes and smaller, more frequent software releases can dramatically increase productivity of developement organizations.
• "Infrastructure as code".
• Creating a culture with continual experimentation, which requires taking risks and learning from success and failure, and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery.
• Creating a culture of innovation and risk-taking and high trust (as opposed to low-trust, command and control)

 

The graph above is the most effective way of communicating the catastrophic consequences of overloaded IT workers and the fallacies of using typical project management techniques for IT operations

• The five dysfunctions of a team:
• absence of trust
• fear of conflict
• lack of commitment
• avoidance of accountability
• inattention to results
• Enable themselves to be vulnerable.
• It is now my aspiration in every domain of my life to never fear conflict, never be afraid to tell the truth, and never be afraid to say what I really think.
• The notion of the need for daily repetition in order to create habits, in order to change the outcomes, is now well established in the domains of sports training, learning to play a musical instrument, military Special Forces training, and now in modern manufacturing.
• Relentless improvement and innovation
• Underscores the importance of the performance of the entire system, as opposed to the performance of a specific silo of work or department.
• The earliest integration of information security into the software.
• Too much WIP in IT are truly devastating.
• Go talk to the business process owners. Find out what their exact roles are, what business processes underpin their goals, and then get them from the top list of things that jeopardize those goals.
• First, when defects were found, we fixed them immediately.
• Dev and Ops working together, along with QA and the business, are a super-tribe that can achieve amazing things.
• The challenge is how to pull all of us together, so that we're working toward the same goal.
• They want six months to gather the requirements, another nine months to develop and test, and if we're lucky, we might be able to put it into production one year from now.
• We'd like to break the outsourcing contract early, bringing those resources back into the company.
• IT is not merely a department. Instead it's pervasive, like electricity. It's a skill, like being able to read or do math.
• The business and IT can't make decisions exclusive of each other.
• The relationship between IT and the business is like a dysfunctional marriage-both feel powerless and held hostage by the other.
• IT should either be embedded into business operations or into the business.