beyond-the-phoenix-project-notes

* Module 1,2: The phoenix project + Goldratt

Theory of constraints
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

Four types of work:
Business projects: backed by dev project, tracked
Internal IT projects: infra, operations, automation, not visible
Operational change: distanced from business projects
Unplanned work: generated from failures, audits, tracked by problem tickets

Failure demand vs project demand

Things Operations and manufacturing have in parallel:
Flow control
Job release

Three ways of devops:
Flow from code to customer, quality, security etc, (left to right)
Feedback (right to left)
Experimentation and learning

Value stream flow

Global optimization

CD seminal paper (Jez Humble, Dan North, Chris read ):
https://continuousdelivery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/deployment_production_line.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery

Paul Hammond + John Allspaw: 10+ deploys a day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4

Goldratt's techniques:
Drum, buffer, rope
Current reality tree
Future reality tree
Categories of legitimate reservation
Core chronic conflict
Evaporating clouds

* Module 3: Dr Deming

14 points
1. Create constancy of purpose, find purpose
2. Adapt the new philosophy through cooperative leadership, replace the top-down, command-and-control structure
3. Cease dependencies on inspection to achieve quality, build quality from the start
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag, it's not how much it costs to make it, it's how much money you are gonna make if you make it, Agile budgeting
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, amplify feedback loops using PDCA, Ancon cord, test-driven development, behavior-driven development
6. Institute training on the job
7. Help people and machines do a better job
8. Drive out fear, blameless post-mortems, retrospectives, cognitive biases
9. Breakdown walls between departments
10. Stop management by slogans
11. Supervisors must change sheer numbers to quality
12. Eliminate barriers that rob people in management and engineering to take pride of workmanship
13. Education and self-improvement
14. Transformation is everybody's job. Put everybody work towards this direction


System of profound knowledge:
Appreciation for systems thinking
Knowledge of variation (common cause vs special cause variation)
Theory of knowledge - PDCA
Knowledge of psychology, cognitive mechanism & biases


* Module 4: Lean

Toyota production system
Toyota was a community of scientists continually experimenting
"Let them copy and process, but they will never be able to understand our culture"

Value, value stream mapping, flow, kaizen

Dr Steven Spear 1999 HBR article about toyota
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5356f7d5e4b0fe1121e2cb5b/t/565278a3e4b058e88fcd6f1b/1448245411007/decoding_dna+of+TPS.pdf

* Module 5: Safety culture
1.0 vs 2.0

"It's a culture that allows people to give the boss bad news," as defined by Dr. Sidney Dekker

From "who?" to "what?"

There is no root cause
Deming and non deterministic

Sidney Dekker and B17 bomber story, good storyteller
https://intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/word_doc/0026/43739/Professor-Sidney-Dekker-transcript.docx
https://itrevolution.com/human-factor-sidney-dekker/

How complex systems fail - Web Operations by John Allspaw
https://www.kitchensoap.com/2009/11/12/how-complex-systems-fail-a-webops-perspective/


Error budget construct: balance between velocity and reliability

Technical aspects of devops
Dr Cook 18 truths about complexity:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/18-truths-the-long-fail-of-complexity/

Mark Nyaguard - circuit switching ???

Jesse Robbins AWS and Chaos Engr
FIT at Netflix's chaos tooling

Soft aspects:
Just Culture
Transparency
Honesty

Devops = lean + safety culture


Marc Imbriaco about heroku outage post mortem
https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2015/01/12/cloud-outages-transparency-and-trust/
https://vimeo.com/67178303

Above the line and below the line framework
https://itrevolution.com/john-allspaw-how-your-systems-keep-running-day-after-day/

* Module 6: Learning organizations
 
5 principles of mental models
https://fs.blog/mental-models/

Demings letter to review book

MIT beer game - learnings?
http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/SDG/beergame.html


Change how people behave, not how they think

Feedback loops are present in military
Cybernetics missle guidance
John Boyd: Ooda loop
https://fs.blog/2021/03/ooda-loop/


Command control org type vs  Dynamic learning organizations

"It's only testing that can transform fear to boredom"

How to learn effectively?
Internal technology conferences
Blameless postmortems
Hackathons
Dojos
Internal devops days

Psychology of estimation, faster isn't better

Devops is culture and professional movement

* Module 7,8: Lean, safety and learning orgs

Conversation with Sidney Dekker, Steven Spear and Richard Cook at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2017

Surgical sayings:
"If there are more than two operations for a certain condition, then none of them are any good"
"Good results come from experience and experience comes from bad results"
"You have to choose between bad options"

Incident is an unplanned investment



People mentioned: 
Goldratt, 
Deming, 
Spear, 
Mary Poppendieck, 
Ben Rockwood, 
Mike Rother, 
Mark Burgess, 
Peter Senge, 
Eric Ries, 
Sidney Dekker, 
Dr. Carlota Perez, 
Donald Reinertsen 
L. David Marquet, 
Richard Cook, 
Dr Woods 

Principles and practices mentioned: 
mental models,
the chaos simian army,
COSO cube,
drum-buffer-rope,
current reality trees,
determinism,
hypothesis driven development,
ETTO,
bad apple theory
Westrum's Typology of Organisational Culture.

Books mentioned: 
Devops handbook, 
The goal (Goldratt), 
Out of crisis (Deming), 
New economics (Deming), 
Fifth discipline (Peter Senge), 
Thinking fast and slow (Kahneman Daniel), 
Web operations (John Allspaw), 
The machine that changed the world, 
The High-Velocity Edge, 
Turn that ship around, 
The lean startup job, 
Start with the why ( Why -- how -- what), 
Team of teams, 
The other side of innovation