The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“So that’s what’s on the second slide, which shows what I believe are the more important company goals. I look at this slide every day.” 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 sh

She flips to the second page. “The projects seem to fall into the following categories: replacing fragile infrastructure, vendor upgrades, or supporting some internal business requirement. The rest are a hodgepodge of audit and security work, data center upgrade work, and so forth.”

You’ve just described ‘technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form o

Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!”

our sales planning process?

a vendor for a $200,000 project to do customer data mining and another vendor to plug into all our POS systems to get sales data for customer analytics. “The first problem is that both projects violate the data privacy policy that we’ve given our customers,” John says. “We repeatedly promise that we will not share data with partners. Whether we cha

efficiency and effectiveness of operations.

them? Customer retention: Are we gaining or losing

What got worked on was based on who yelled the loudest or most often, who could engineer the best side deals with the expediters, or who could get the ear of the highest ranking executive.”