The Phoenix Project

When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work.

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.

What worked for you in the Marines will never work here, considering how they run this circus. Instead of one general in your chain of command, you’ve got ten generals calling the shots here, and all of them have a direct line to each and every private in your company.

The Third Way is all about ensuring that we’re continually putting tension into the system, so that we’re continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

Most of the time, we’re flying blind… The best data that we have right now comes from interviewing our store managers every two months and the customer focus groups we do twice a year. You can’t run a billion-dollar business this way and expect to succeed!

Your job as VP of IT Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure IT service.

People think that just because IT doesn’t use motor oil and carry physical packages that it doesn’t need preventive maintenance… That somehow, because the work and the cargo that IT carries are invisible, you just need to sprinkle more magic dust on the computers to get them running again... showing how IT risks jeopardize business performance measures, you can start making better business decisions.