In part two of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble about the past and current state of DevOps. Forsgren and Humble share with Kim their DevOps aha moments and what has been the most interesting thing they’ve learned since the book was released in 2016. Jez discusses the architectural properties of the programming language PHP and what it has in common with ASP.NET. He also talks about the anguish he...

In part one of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Patrick Debois and John Willis about the past, present, and future of DevOps. By sharing their personal stories and experiences, Kim, Debois, and Willis discuss the scenius that inspired the book, and why and how the DevOps movement took hold around the world.   They also examine the updated content in the book, including new case studies, updated metrics, and practices. Finally,...

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Scott Havens, who is the Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. Havens is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Havens was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue. Havens shares his...

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim shares and gives commentary on Scott Havens’ talk from the 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas. Havens is a Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. He is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Scott was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for...

In this newest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Gail Murphy, Professor of Computer Science and Vice President of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is also the co-founder, board member, and former Chief Scientist at Tasktop. Dr. Murphy’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage, and coordinate the information that matters most for their...

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Steven Spear on his critiques of several articles from the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, and their characterization of the impact of “Just in Time” supply chains and the widespread shortages caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic. While the unprecedented health crisis created a widespread shortage of almost everything—from toilet paper to semiconductor chips to raw materials vital for medical materials—with results that...

In March of 2021, Gene Kim visited the mass vaccination site at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, which has been described by the press as a logistical masterpiece where over 465,000 Oregonians have been vaccinated as of May 2021. After a three-hour tour of the site, Gene Kim sat down with Trent Green, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Legacy Health and one of the organizers of the mass vaccination operation. Kim and Green discuss firsthand what it looks...

In the second part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim continues his conversation with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University and creator of the Westrum organization typology model.    In part two of their conversation, Kim and Westrum talk about generative cultures and why Westrum thinks they are more important now than it they were a hundred years ago. Westrum also shares his observations on the increasing number of functional...

In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. His work on organizational culture and his contribution of the Westrum organizational typology model have been instrumental in understanding what makes a high-performing organization across industries. For decades, he has studied complex organizations from medicine to aviation to the nuclear industry.   In part one of their...

In the second part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast Gene Kim and Admiral John Richardson, former Chief of Naval Operations, continue their discussion on the importance of leadership in large, complex organizations, especially enabling leadership training early in one’s career, and exploring why he views it as so important. Admiral Richardson also shares why radical delegation is needed more than ever, and provides tools and techniques for enabling it. Kim and Admiral Richardson...

In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years, the top officer in the Navy. Before that, Admiral Richardson served as director of the US Naval Reactors, which is comprehensively responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the US Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion program.   In part one of this two-part conversation, Kim and Admiral Richardson explore how the Department of Defense and the...

In the final episode of the first season of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Jeffrey Fredrick, coauthor of Agile Conversations, to synthesize and reflect upon some of the major themes from the entire season. In Gene’s continued quest to understand why organizations behave the way they do, Fredrick helps connect the dots and points to new areas that deserve more study. They discuss the nature of knowledge work, including how software creation requires so much more conversation and joint...

This episode of The Idealcast features the second part of Gene Kim’s interview with Team of Teams coauthor and CrossLead CEO David Silverman and CrossLead Head of R&D Jessica Reif. In this episode, they take up the topic of how internal marketplaces are structures that can connect mid-level leaders to each other, helping allocate scarce resources to where they're needed most, which enables the further unlocking of capacities.They discuss challenges around the cost of change and the new...

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim shares David Silverman’s 2020 presentation from DevOps Enterprise Summit London - Virtual. In a continuation of Episode 11, the Team of Teams coauthor and CEO of CrossLead talks about the key concepts from Team of Teams, and provides even more context for so many of the topics covered in last week’s episode.  David talks about the genesis of the joint special operations command, which was created after the failure of the daring Iran hostage...

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim sits down with Team of Team’s coauthor and CEO of Crosslead, David Silverman, and Director of Research and Development at CrossLead, Jessica Reif, for a two-part interview. In Team of Teams, David and his coauthors explained how the Joint Special Forces Task Force in Iraq was struggling to achieve its mission, and how they turned it into a success. Their experience led to a deep and critical rethinking of almost everything in US military services and...

On this continuation of Gene Kim’s interview with Michael Nygard, Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, they discuss his reflections on Admiral Rickover's work with the US Naval Reactor Core and how it may or may not resonate with the principles we hold so near and dear in the DevOps community. They also tease apart the learnings from the architecture of the Toyota Production System and their ability to drive down the cost of...

In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim provides original commentary on Michael Nygard’s 2016 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation Tempo, Maneuverability, and InitiativeDevOps has been and continues to be part of a larger shift in organizational structure, system architecture, infrastructure, and process design. In order to be successful, each of these must change together to achieve a high tempo. In this presentation, Nygard talks about maneuverability and how to get teams, and...

In the latest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim is joined by Michael Nygard, a senior vice president at Sabre and author of the bestselling Release It! Nygard has helped businesses and technology leaders in their transformation journeys over his long career and was even one of the inspirations behind The Unicorn Project’s protagonist, Maxine. In their discussion, Kim and Nygard explore how we can enable thousands or even tens of thousands of engineers to work together toward common...

ON THIS EPISODEIn this bonus follow-up interview, Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear dig into what makes for great leadership today, including the importance of distributed decision-making and problem-solving. They showcase the real advantages of allowing more decisions to be made by the people closest to the work, who are the most suited to solve them. Dr. Spear also shares his personal accounts of the honorable Paul O’Neill, the late CEO of Alcoa who built an incredible culture of safety and...

ON THIS EPISODE In the latest Dispatch from the Scenius, Gene Kim brings you two of Dr. Steve Spear’s DevOps Enterprise Summit presentations in their entirety. In Spear’s 2019 presentation, “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How Finding and Fixing Faults is the Path to Perfection,” he talks about the need and the value of finding faults in our thinking that result in faults in our doing.  Spear continues to explore this lesson in his 2020 presentation about the US Navy 100 years ago, when...

ON THIS EPISODEIn this episode of The Idealcast with Gene Kim, Dr. Steve Spear talks about the primary characteristics of dynamic learning organizations, through the lens of its structure and the resulting dynamics, and how it enables those organizations to win and dominate in the marketplace. From his 1999 Harvard Business Review article “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” to his bestselling book The High-Velocity Edge to his monomaniacal advocate for the scientific method...

ON THIS EPISODEIn the second installment of The Idealcast’s Dispatch From the Scenius series, Gene Kim explores Elisabeth Hendrickson’s 2015 and 2014 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentations.Listen as Gene breaks down Hendrickson’s experience and learnings, all to help you find fundamental principles to apply to immediately keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.In this episode, Hendrickson, an experienced QA engineer, shares her realization that the better she got at her job, the worse...

ON THIS EPISODEIn Episode 3, Gene Kim is joined by Elisabeth Hendrickson, a longtime colleague and inspiration behind The DevOps Handbook and, more recently, The Unicorn Project. Her stories from the trenches shaped the way Gene sees the world of DevOps. From Dev test ratios to the importance of architecture and the need for leaders to decompose systems well, Elisabeth has been a huge inspiration to the entire DevOps community. Together they explore her years as VP R&D for Pivotal...