The Phoenix Project

Here I sit, hands tied
Room angry, I could save them
If only they knew

CIO stands for “Career Is Over."

“I need the business to tell me it’s no longer being held hostage by you IT guys. This has been the running complaint the entire time I’ve been CEO . IT is in the way of every major initiative. Meanwhile, our competitors pull away from us, leaving us in the dust. Dammit, we can’t even take a crap without IT being in the way.”

But that’s like throwing gasoline on the fire. Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn’t crashing production systems, and I’ll show you one who can’t fog a mirror. Or more likely, is on vacation.

.... my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.

To tell the truth is an act of love.
To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.

This should be your guiding principle:
You win when you protect the organization without putting meaningless work into the IT system.
And you win even more when you can take meaningless work out of the IT system

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

Life in IT is pretty shitty when it’s so misunderstood and mismanaged.
It becomes thankless and frustrating as people realize that they are powerless to change the outcome,
like an endlessly repeating horror movie.

Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily
is better than practicing once a week for three hours.
And if you want to create a genuine culture of improvement,
you must create those habits.

And so far, we’re basing everything on hearsay.
That doesn’t work for solving crimes,
and it definitely doesn’t work for solving outages.