This document appears to be notes from a book or training that is depicting how typical IT practices can lead to downward spirals of technical debt, fragile systems, and overreliance on firefighting. It outlines 8 breakthrough insights that were discovered to help address these issues: 1) reducing work-in-progress to prevent bottlenecks, 2) prioritizing preventative work, 3) limiting new work to prevent overloading teams, 4) making work visible and constraining dependencies, 5) standardizing work and managing handoffs, 6) properly scoping security and audit work, 7) implementing DevOps practices to reduce batch sizes and enable flow, and 8) bringing outsourced work back in-house when there is capacity.

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Fragile artefacts become more fragile
Technical debt grows
Date-driven application projects focus only on features, sacrificing non-functional
requirements, which results in more fragile artifacts in production
Application deployment take longer, more difficult, getting gets worse
IT Ops is stuck firefighting and therefore cannot do preventive work or new projects
Long feature delivery cycle times result in more political decision making, meaning
more focus on features (vs. non-functional requirements)
Breakthrough 1: discovering too much WIP in IT Operations and gobsmacking
Page 198 amounts of reliance on Brent for both project and recovery work
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Are these real for you?
Dr. Goldratt’s Logical Thinking Processes to create the downward IT spiral slide,
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Depiction of how predominant practices
pre-ordain failure
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Verbalization of observations of current
reality
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Part 2: iterative solving of problems
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Part 1: vivid description of the problem
Chap Page
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Breakthrough 2: elevating preventive work to prevent unplanned work
Page 253 (especially for Brent) and making work visible
Breakthrough 3: throttling the flow of work into IT Operations by the project
Page 201 freeze (subordinate)
Breakthrough 4: identifying and constraining the flows of work to Brent (it was
Page 228 genuinely surprising to find out after the fact at how much this resembles the
green/red tag pattern used in “The Goal”) Kanban Board
Breakthrough 5: documenting and defining standardized work, and managing
Page 236 handoffs to reduce time spent in queue (through use of kanbans), and further
reducing reliance on Brent
Breakthrough 6: correctly identifying reliance on IT systems to hit Dick’s
Page 218 corporate objectives (via Gartner RVM model) and correctly scoping audit and
infosec (via GAIT and GAIT-R)
Breakthrough 7: building DevOps flow of work to better design in non-functional
requirements in Dev, reduce batch sizes and enable single-piece flow through
Page 303-304
Development and IT Operations and better enable operational resilience
(replicating the work described by Jez Humble, David Farley, Paul Hammond
and John Allspaw)
Breakthrough 8: when they discover the constraint moves outside the
organization, they bring back those resources in-house (replicating one of my
Page 325 favourite Theory of Constraints plays: when there’s idle plant capacity, it’s often
cheaper to fabricate parts in-house than to pay a supplier. Lovely.)
*Page 99
THE THREE WAYS
' 1 The flow, 2 Consistent Feedback, 3 Continual Learning
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