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.
August 4, 2020
In The Phoenix Project, we introduced the Three Ways underpinning DevOps. In my follow-up book, The Unicorn Project, I revisit Parts Unlimited and describe my learnings through the Five Ideals.
These are five topics that I’ve constantly gravitated toward over the last decade, and I continually seek to learn more about them even now! They seem to underpin what is required to create, as my friend Jon Smart says, better value, sooner, safer, and happier. And I am convinced that they are required to help our organizations survive and win in the marketplace.
We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. We need simplicity in everything we do. This ideal relates to the degree to which a development team can make local code changes in a single location without impacting various teams. The last place we want complexity is internally, whether it’s in our code, in our organization, or in our processes.
The Second Ideal is all about how our daily work feels. Is our work marked by boredom and waiting for other people to get things done on our behalf? Do we blindly work on small pieces of the whole, only seeing the outcomes of our work during deployment when everything blows up, leading to firefighting, punishment, and burnout? Or do we work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work? These are the conditions that allow for focus and flow, challenge, learning, discovery, mastering our domain, and even joy. This is what being a developer means.
The Third Ideal addresses paying down technical debt and improving architecture. When technical debt is treated as a priority and paid down and architecture is continuously improved and modernized, teams can work with flow, delivering better value sooner, safer, and happier. And the business ultimately wins when developers can deliver on enterprise performance goals.
Psychological safety is one of the top predictors of team performance. When team members feel safe to talk about problems, problems can not only be fixed but prevented. Solving problems requires honesty, and honesty requires an absence of fear. In knowledge work, psychological safety should be treated with the same importance as physical safety is in manufacturing.
Customer focus relates to the difference between core and context as defined by Geoffrey Moore. Core is what customers are willing and able to pay for, the bread and butter of your business. Context is what they don’t care about, what it took to get them that product, including all the backend systems of an organization like HR and marketing and development. It’s critical to look at these Context systems as essential, as mission critical, and fund them appropriately. Context should never kill core.
Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over 1 million copies—he is the WSJ bestselling author of Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit (now Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
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