The Phoenix Project: 10 Minute Summary

The First Way

The First Way concerns the processes between the business and the customer – in particular, it explains how to create a fast flow of work from Development into IT operations, and then to the customer.

According to this principle, to maximize the flow, you need to optimize for global goals. So, instead of focusing on local goals like Ops availability measures, you'd need to have a bigger picture in mind which you'd strive for. The entire system is more important than specific departments.

The authors provide the following measures to create the fast flow:

• Building systems and organizations that are safe to change; • Limiting work in process; • Continuous integration and deployment; • Creating environments on demand.

In the book, the First Way – creating flow – took place when Bill tried to organize the change process, making his people put their intended changes on index cards and then put the cards on a kanban board. The cards visualized the work in progress in a way that everyone could see.

It's important to mention here that the kanban board, as Patty explains, is "one of the primary ways our manufacturing plants schedule and pull work through the system" - this is one of the proofs of similarity between IT and manufacturing.

To limit the work in process (WIP), she makes a decision to visually demonstrate all the activities involving their key resources on the kanban board, where index cards will be arranged in four rows: "Move worker office," "Add/change/delete account," "Provision new desktop/laptop," and "Reset password", diving each of the rows into three columns labeled "Ready", "Doing", and "Done."

She insists that all important activities must go through the board, not by emails, phone calls, or messaging: if it's not on there, it won't be done, and if it is on there, it will be done faster:

You'd be amazed at how fast work is getting completed, because we're limiting the work in process. Based on our experiments so far, I think we're going to be able to predict lead times for work and get faster throughput than ever.

In addition to that, an important part of the First Way which the company was missing was the disability to distinguish what work mattered versus what did not. As Erik pointed out, taking needless work out of the system is more important than putting more work into it.

This is why it is mandatory to know what exactly can help achieve business objectives – projects, security, compliance with regulations etc. After all, it is the outcomes that really matter, not the work you do.