Maria Vargas’s Reviews > The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win > Status Update
Maria Vargas
is 44% done
When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts.
— Oct 03, 2026 08:34PM
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Maria’s Previous Updates
Maria Vargas
is 78% done
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.
— 1 hour, 31 min ago
Maria Vargas
is 76% done
We need to create a culture that reinforces the value of taking risks and learning from failure and the need for repetition and practice to create mastery.
— 2 hours, 1 min ago
Maria Vargas
is 64% done
Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill.
— 5 hours, 31 min ago
Maria Vargas
is 41% done
A great team doesn’t mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.
— Oct 03, 2026 02:31PM
Maria Vargas
is 38% done
Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. To do that, you need to know what matters to the achievement of the business objectives, whether it’s projects, operations, strategy, compliance with laws and regulations, security, or whatever.
— Oct 03, 2026 02:03PM
Maria Vargas
is 37% done
Remember, unplanned work kills your ability to do planned work, so you must always do whatever it takes to eradicate it.
— Oct 03, 2026 02:01PM
Maria Vargas
is 17% done
A half hour later, we finally write on the whiteboard: “a ‘change’ is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.”
Not everything is a change 🙄
— Sep 30, 2026 07:13PM
Not everything is a change 🙄
Maria Vargas
is 9% done
Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent. Can everything really be that important?
— Sep 29, 2026 08:15PM
Maria Vargas
is 6% done
Information Security is always flashing their badges at people and making urgent demands, regardless of the consequences to the rest of the organization, which is why we don’t invite them to many meetings. The best way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to have them in the room.
FACTS 😂
— Sep 29, 2026 08:01PM
FACTS 😂
Maria Vargas
is 6% done
Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.
Very common also within developers of other teams or even Operations 😩
— Sep 29, 2026 08:01PM
Very common also within developers of other teams or even Operations 😩