Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
New half-day virtual events with live watch parties worldwide!
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
February 11, 2015
In my journey, some of the moments I treasure the most are hanging out and learning from some of the best thinkers in the DevOps community. Without a doubt, this includes Jez Humble, famous for the book he co-authored with David Farley, “Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation”.
(In my opinion, Jez is not only one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, he is also one of the most decent human beings on the planet. He’s one of the co-authors of the upcoming “DevOps Cookbook,” as well as one of the collaborators on the Puppet Labs State of DevOps Survey, going into its third year.)
Anyone who has read “Continuous Delivery” will recognize that he is a fantastic boundary-spanner, talking with equal ease about Architecture, Development, Test and IT Operations.
His extraordinary boundary-spanning continues in “Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale,” which he co-authored Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly. I had the pleasure of critiquing early drafts last year, and finally got a chance to read the final version that went to print.
In short, I recommend it to anyone who wants to see what technology work should look like, where we are bringing the full capabilities of “Lean Startup”-style experimentation into UX, product owners, and the DevOps value stream.
In their words, the pain and the promise the authors make in this book is to:
We wrote the book because of our frustration at the state of the industry. The techniques and practices we describe are not new, and they are known to work. However, they are not yet mainstream, and are often implemented piecemeal, leading to local, rather than systemic, improvements. As a result, companies toil at building — at huge cost — products, services, and businesses that do not deliver the expected value to customers.When Continuous Delivery (Addison-Wesley) and The Lean Startup (Crown Business) were published, we saw an enormous amount of demand from people working in enterprises who wanted to adopt the practices described in these books. A large number of companies have achieved measurable benefit from using the practices we discuss, resulting in delivery of higher-quality products to market faster, increased customer satisfaction, and higher returns on investment. This comes with reduced cost and risk as well as happier employees who are no longer working unsustainable hours and have the opportunity to harness their creativity and passion at work.
We wrote the book because of our frustration at the state of the industry. The techniques and practices we describe are not new, and they are known to work. However, they are not yet mainstream, and are often implemented piecemeal, leading to local, rather than systemic, improvements. As a result, companies toil at building — at huge cost — products, services, and businesses that do not deliver the expected value to customers.
When Continuous Delivery (Addison-Wesley) and The Lean Startup (Crown Business) were published, we saw an enormous amount of demand from people working in enterprises who wanted to adopt the practices described in these books. A large number of companies have achieved measurable benefit from using the practices we discuss, resulting in delivery of higher-quality products to market faster, increased customer satisfaction, and higher returns on investment. This comes with reduced cost and risk as well as happier employees who are no longer working unsustainable hours and have the opportunity to harness their creativity and passion at work.
Indeed, I believe this book will help us to achieve that mission. The reader is taken on a wild ride of all the various mental models, tools and techniques that will help technology leaders and practitioners get the highest value from technology projects and services.
Why do I say “wild ride?” Because the authors introduce the topics from a diverse and surprising set of places.
Below, I list a just a sample of the incredible surface area that the book covers. If you are blown away (or maybe even intimidated) by the breadth of what is covered, I would claim that exposure to these concepts will be increasingly required for the next generation of technology leaders.
Many excellent case studies are presented of how these principles put into practice, including UK.gov, how the ARM processor was created, Etsy, Amazon, etc.
You can see the scope and breadth of topics reflected in the FlowCon conference that Jez Humble runs. The conference program has a very wide field of view, encompassing UX, business, product owners, Dev, Test and Ops — perhaps stretching the boundary-spanning capabilities of most of us, and certainly their actual roles and responsibilities.
Think of this book, then as not just a textbook of how to do your daily work, but as a practical and broad survey of materials that will enable the next generation of leaders to win in the marketplace. As MBA programs eventually shift their emphasis from “command and control” to “mission command,” this book points the direction that their curriculums will evolve to.
I recommend it wholeheartedly, and think you’ll find it stimulating, exciting, and bound to change the way you think about your next technology project, and maybe the even the work that you do.
For those of you interested in these topics, I would also recommend the following books that have influenced my thinking over the last two decades:
Gene Kim is a best-selling author whose books have sold over 1 million copies. He authored the widely acclaimed book "The Unicorn Project," which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Additionally, he co-authored several other influential works, including "The Phoenix Project," "The DevOps Handbook," and the award-winning "Accelerate," which received the prestigious Shingo Publication Award. His latest book, “Wiring the Winning Organization,” co-authored with Dr. Steven Spear, was released in November 2023.
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