I was advising somebody who had been tasked with improving a single process. I said that without a systemic improvement of all the processes and the technologies and the people around it, trying to improve one process is like trying to improve one cog in the machine.
There are some fundamental fallacies which have misled IT in the past and one of them is "the engineering fallacy", the false belief that we build IT systems like engineers build bridges.
Lean theory tells us that the optimal batch size is 1 [update: no it doesn't. Optimal batch size is often 1, especially in a manufacturing context.]
i.e. we perform each unit of work on demand and it flows independently through the value stream.
Certainly that is the case when you order one of my books which are printed on demand individually and posted directly to you.
I am still learning about systems and flow. Some of you will know that I am a train nut: I like railways. So it puzzled me to read an article recently in Trains magazine about the trend to larger trains, which have increased by a factor of 100 over the last 150 years.
Nobody reads books any more. They come thick and fast, and few of us have the time or the attention span.
So forget my post on great DevOps books to read and enjoy this one on seminal DevOps articles and posts. Never mind the meat and vegetables, have some snacks.
Several times recently I got the message (overtly or subliminally) that if you don't work with software and tools you can't understand DevOps, that if you haven't immersed yourself in the sacred waters of cutting code then you are somehow unenlightened.
Most people who seem to be blocking progress are in fact well intentioned and trying to do the right thing but they are victims of the system in which they work.