Geoff Mazeroff

This post continues the book club discussion of The Phoenix Project. See also: The Phoenix Project – Part 3

Here are my notes for chapters 16-20…

• We discussed Steve confronting Bill about why he wasn’t in the office dealing with the crisis… “What do you need that you aren’t getting right now?” Jameson said this was a rational response that wasn’t received well by Steve who was emotionally charged.
• Related to what Steve wanted (more hands on keyboards)… symptom > disease, short-term action > long-term planning.
• Despite it being Bill’s job to communicate what can and can’t be done and to escalate risks, Bill gets blamed for providing an answer Steve doesn’t want to hear.
• It feels bad to leave people when there’s a crisis (or seven!), but someone will have to pay the price if not Bill. Geoff thought the idea of Bill setting healthy boundaries was important.
• All three of us wondered what kind of “come to Jesus” conversation Erik had with Steve to make him do a 180 on his approach and attitude.
• None of us have seen a real-world version of Erik in our careers… Someone who has influence over the CEO, knows what he’s doing, and Socratically mentors. Maybe these features wouldn’t manifest in a single individual, as Erik is likely a narrative convenience for the book.
• The CEO and CIO are in a dysfunctional relationship; both powerless and held hostage. This is action vs. planning. They also approach money from different perspectives — IT is both a cost center and a necessary component for making the profit center possible.
• Vulnerability is important, but it happened a bit too smoothly in the off-site meeting. Jameson posited that if Sarah was there, the event wouldn’t have worked. Steve started the conversation, which set the tone for everyone else.
• Given what we learn of Steve’s backstory, perhaps Erik planted the seed that Steve is going down a road he said he didn’t want to travel again, and that if he didn’t change his ways, he’d regret it.
• The definition of “done” (just like the definition of “change”) is important. IT hit the deadline, but Phoenix fell over after that. Getting everyone in agreement eliminates the “throw it over the wall” mentality; we need to speak the same language.
• Delays propagate.
• We all agreed that it’s critical to consider what work you’ll commit to. The logic of “if work, then do it” doesn’t account for analysis, capacity, or prioritization.
• The business will continue to stack up work faster than you can do it. Sure, put it on the backlog, but if you don’t get to it relatively soon, people will work around your system to expedite things. The root problems are throughput and capacity.
• Unplanned work eats up time to work on planned work.
• I loved the term “IT capacity death spiral” — no time left for planning, which means you’re only working on the important/urgent work (see the Eisenhower Method).
• The CEO needs data to back up why things will fail; this builds trust.
• Halting everything that’s not the single focus will help. Also, throwing more people on the problem won’t necessarily help (too many cooks in the kitchen). What about idle resources, then? The book implies that the cost of screwing things up to keep everybody at 100% exceeds the cost of them being idle while the single focus finishes.
• Steve has to cover his managers proactively by stating the priorities. Things would move slower if the managers had to react by saying, “Steve said we need to focus on Phoenix.” It’s difficult to say no to others when you’re already in hot water.
• Brent is a worker, not a work center. Think of him as the equipment repairman, not the equipment. He can only fix one thing at a time.
• Sometimes lessons learned through embarrassment can stick with you longer. (Context: Erik having Bill describe what’s going on in the factory and being a bit condescending about it.)
• Work center: the machine, the man, the method, the measures.
• Process can standardize so you can move faster with quality and eventually automation. This probably only makes sense once you have enough demand.
• The monitoring project (i.e., what is Brent doing and how) is the most vital; standardize, create a “bill of resources” with dependencies identified.
• Improving something is better than nothing. We disagree in general; if you’re optimizing anything other than the bottleneck, it’s waste.
• Entropy catches up with you. We had some discussion of technical debt vs. gardening metaphors.
• Repetition leads to habits which lead to mastery.