IT Revolution's video: Gene Kim AMA 1 of 3 - IT Rev Book Club: The Unicorn Project

90 minute Ask Me Anything with Gene Kim, author of The Unicorn Project (Jan 8, 2020) Read the transcript: https://itrevolution.com/gene-kim-tup-ama-1-of-3/ 1. Have you considered publishing an "Oops All Crunch-berries" book where it's just Dr. Erik Reid telling the reader what to do and why? 2. Have you considered publishing a 3rd POV for this timeline illustrating the perspective of business stakeholders like marketing and sales and fin - maybe a bit lighter on the tech speak? 3. Which educational opportunities could you recommend in the devops space(certificates, MBA, PhD)? I already have a master in business administration and a master in software development. What could be the next step? 4. In beyond the Phoenix project there is a discussion on how bottlenecks tend to shift after improvements and what to do about it. Is there more info about this somewhere? 5. How do you see enterprise architecture fitting into the context of the book? 6. What metrics were used for measuring value and weighted lead times etc? 7. Why does it need a crisis to make change happen? to we have prepare in the underground and let it crash and burn before we can change things with support of management?) What if you sit in the phoenix project at year 2 years, and know it will take another year to crash and burn before things change? 8. Some of my team members, working in the "old way" for the last 30 years, are having really hard time embracing the change. In case a solution does not exist, and you have to let one or more resources go, how would you suggest to do it without spreading "fear" to the whole team? 9. I'm curious myself how to - in a more people-friendly way (read: avoiding people getting fired) - inspire the change bottom-up? 10. The book says Maxine didn't check her phone during 2 entire weeks of vacations. How realistic is this in the companies you've worked in the past? Weren't employees pressured to keep an eye on the business during their PTO or didn't they check it anyway, regardless? 11. Could you say more about how you see QA evolving, please? 12. I have experienced that moving from svn to git and github enabled something I did not expect at first at least not to that extent. Discoverability and fast fixes using a user friendly interface. And not so technical people now contributing via the online editor and pull requests fixing minor issues like typos and translations in seconds rather than days. Did you experience something similar? Are there other tools which revolutionized your work? 13. I am a little bit surprised that Maxime seems not to try to find out more desperately what the whole project is about in the beginning. She has worked mainly with the manufacturing system and less with the retail system before so this seems to be a new area for her. If I remember correctly she spent already in the very first days a lot of time drinking coffee out of frustration. I would have expected that she would have tried more to speak with senior people in the project to find out what all is about. Any special reason for not including that in the first chapters? 14. What would be the list of books Maxine would hand off to Maia and Page (the middle school girls working in Python) or Tom after she had piqued their curiosity about Functional Programming for them to learn more at the entry level (real or even books that are missing that need to be written with what kind of content) 15. Question from my friend and I: What organization size fits the “Distinguished Engineer” role? 16. Have you considered writing another POV from John’s perspective? 17. The Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy - Why the term "Joy"? It feels strange to use the term Joy. Joy can't be measured can it? 18. What other conferences do you suggest for Engineering IT leaders? 19. Did Maxine (you) get one of the first Ember mugs? That part of her story resonated with me. Example of excited engagement. 20. How can you find out if there is a “Rebellion” inside your company ? If there isn’t how to start one ? 21. What is your perspective on How the Product Drive Org model applies to Infrastructure Services. Basically convincing a CTO group this product stuff applies to them and they are critical. 22. As an agile based enterprise recently acquired by a monolity/waterfall based company, how can we prevent their practices from changing (regressing) ours. Or better, changing theirs? 23. How do you balance the quantity of dashboards you are showing verses the quality to not have information overload? 24. How do you go from showing interest/getting more involve in the platform while not dropping the ball in your day-to-day feature work? 25. Do you have a personal experience you can share where you decided it was better for you to move on rather than continue fighting the good fight? 26. Do you have any advice to those feeling burnout that look to your books for inspiration and fuel? 27. Is there a link to the CapitalOne and CSG experience Reports from DOES?