Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management.

WIP is the silent killer.

Tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.”

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.”

The First Way helps us understand how to create fast flow of work as it moves from Development into IT Operations, because that’s what’s between the business and the customer.

Second Way shows us how to shorten and amplify feedback loops, so we can fix quality at the source and avoid rework.

Third Way shows us how to create a culture that simultaneously fosters experimentation, learning from failure, and understanding that repetition and practice are the prerequisites to mastery.”

Four types of work.

Two categories of work: business projects and internal IT projects.

Changes are the third category of work.

"Will I spend the rest of my career doing COBOL maintenance or become just another has-been middle manager?"

"It’s not the upfront capital that kills you, it’s the operations and maintenance on the back end."

The fourth category of work is unplanned work!

First Way, which is creating fast flow of work through Development and IT Operations.

Continually eradicate your largest sources of unplanned work, per the Second Way.”

Read The Goal by Dr. Eli Goldratt.

You’re not paying down technical debt, so your problems and amount of unplanned work continues to increase over time,”

Five focusing steps which Goldratt describes

• Step 1 is to identify the constraint.
• Step 2 is to exploit the constraint,”
• Step 3, which is to subordinate the constraint.

Development, is spending all his cycles on features, instead of stability, security, scalability, manageability, operability, continuity, and all those other beautiful ’itties.

Read Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

Four types of work: business projects, IT Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work. Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!

Conditioned to believe that no isn’t an acceptable answer, we all just became compliant order takers, blindly marching down a doomed path.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

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.

Practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours.

Wait time for a given resource is the percentage that resource is busy, divided by the percentage that resource is idle.

Critical part of the Second Way is making wait times visible,

Plan-Do-Check-Act

CFO GOALS Health of company Revenue Market share Average order size Profitability Return on assets Health of Finance Order to cash cycle Accounts receivable Accurate and timely financial reporting Borrowing costs

• Are we competitive?
• Understanding customer needs and wants: Do we know what to build?
• Product portfolio: Do we have the right products?
• R&D effectiveness: Can we build it effectively?
• Time to market: Can we ship it soon enough to matter?
• Sales pipeline: Can we convert products to interested prospects?
• Are we effective?
• Customer on-time delivery: Are customers getting what we promised them?
• Customer retention: Are we gaining or losing customers?
• Sales forecast accuracy: Can we factor this into our sales planning process?

First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that IT operates in.

Key performance indicator (KPI)

Is ‘sales forecast accuracy’ is being jeopardized by our poor grasp of ‘understanding our customer needs and wants?’

The name of the game is quick time to market and to fail fast.

Continually reduce cycle times is part of the First Way.

Need for amplification of feedback loops, ideally from the customer, is part of the Second Way.

‘confidentiality, integrity, and availability triangle’ or CIA.”

Integrate those risks into leading indicators of performance.

Integrating security into all of our daily work, no longer securing things after they’re deployed.

Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill.

First Way is all about controlling the flow of work from Development to IT Operations.

• Batch sizes are still way too large.
• Too much WIP still trapped inside the plant,

Master the Second Way, creating constant feedback loops from IT Operations back into Development, designing quality into the product at the earliest stages.

"In any system of work, the theoretical ideal is single-piece flow, which maximizes throughput and minimizes variance. You get there by continually reducing batch sizes."

Takt time, which is the cycle time needed in order to keep up with customer demand.

Decrease your changeover time and enable faster deployment cycle time.

Dev and Ops working together, along with QA and the business, are a super-tribe that can achieve amazing things.

Until code is in production, no value is actually being generated,

Automated the build and deployment process, recognizing that infrastructure could be treated as code,

Read book "Continuous Delivery".

Eric Ries then showed us how this capability can help the business learn and win in his Lean Startup work.

Get humans out of the deployment business. Figure out how to get to ten deploys a day.

Figure out how at every stage of the agile development process, you not only have shippable code, but a working environment it can deploy into!”

Treating our deployment as if it actually was a plant line!

"patching is so easy, because we can rebuild anything in production with a touch of a button. If it breaks, we can build it again from scratch."

Moved from doing deployments every two weeks to every week, and we’re now experimenting with doing daily deployments. Because the batch size is so much smaller, we can make small changes very quickly.

Third Way. We need to create a culture that reinforces the value of taking risks and learning from failure and the need for repetition and practice to create mastery.

Any COO who doesn’t intimately understand the IT systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.

DevOps, it’s Product Management, Development, IT Operations, and even Information Security all working together and supporting one another.