Yep The Goal is absolutely brilliant. I have read it 3 times and will read it again.

Author here. I loved "The Goal" even more than the Unicorn Project. Use the Theory of Constraints to identify your bottleneck and then limit WIP at the bottleneck or elevate it. By hiring, optimizing...

You are right though: go read The Goal everyone!

I did not write The Goal ;)

The Goal is one of my favorite “business” book (it’s written as a novel). it addresses all of the wasted energy when you target efficiency at the expense of hitting your true goals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

You are right of course, it’s just theory of constraints applied to software. I did read The Goal first before those two :)

My observation has been that theory of constraints is a hidden secret in engineering and most people instead refer to the devops/phoenix version of it.

Anyone ever read The Phoenix Project [0] or The Goal [1]?

The scenario the author described sounds just like the beginning stages from the Phoenix Project (overwhelming amount of tickets, what's the priority, what even are all of these tickets, printing them out to make the work visible).

The concept is Work in Process (WIP). You first need to see it and understand how it moves, or doesn't move throughout the DevOps system.

It seems like there might be a quick, easy read that could truly help OP.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113934.The_Goal

The Goal was actually the primary inspiration for The Phoenix Project, iirc. I think it was mentioned at the end of the book.

I’d suggest books and maybe journals. I’m perhaps a membership with ACM or IEEE, I’m not a member of either but I’m considering it.

The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow (2017):
https://web.archive.org/web/20170406220055/http://dev-books....

The most mentioned books on HN:
https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-ha

And here’s a list of my most resent book purchase. I have high hopes for these books.

The Pragmatic Programmer

Test Driven Development

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility

The Effective Engineer

Type-Driven Development with Idris

Programming Pearls

The Goal

The Phoenix Project

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps

Coders at Work

Code (Charles Petzold)

The Mythical Man Month

Structure and interpretation of computer programs

Ooh interesting constraint. The Goal: A Business Graphic Novel[1] is just a little over 100 pages but very easy to read in a single sitting so surely still counts. It's more-or-less the same as the full novel, which is what inspired The Phoenix Project. For a book genuinely under 100 pages, I'll go with The Little Prince[2]. Just a delightful story that reminds you to focus on what's important in life.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35528537-the-goal

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157993.The_Little_Prince

- Snowball by Alice Schroeder (it's a biography of Warren Buffett). So many life lessons here (in addition to teaching you a way to think through investing)

- The Goal (and its descendants). Changes the way you look at organizations

- Inner Engineering by Sadhguru [0]. Changes the way you look at yourself. I'd say base some of your life decisions around this and you'll live better

- The little book that builds wealth [1] . No, despite the corny title it's about companies that have managed to build moats around them. If you are / want to be an entrepreneur, I am sure you will get some wonderful ideas from this. My personal favourite (to invest in - Waste management companies :) )

[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Inner-Engineering-Sadhguru/dp/0812...

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Little-Book-That-Builds-Wealth/dp/...

My current box of books that I recommend to new managers on my teams:

Technology Specific:

* An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)

* Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Teams (Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim)

* Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)

* Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Marty Cagan)

* The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford)

General:

* The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt)

* Turn the Ship Around! (L David Marquet)

* Just Culture (Sidney Dekker)

* Leadership on the Line (Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky)

* Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)

I'm reminded of the story of the joint interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

The interviewer asked each of them to write down the one thing that contributed most to their success. Both independently wrote "focus".

https://www.inc.com/marc-emmer/bill-gates-warren-buffett-rev...

I remember reading the book The Goal in business school. What impressed me the most, was that the most efficient path to achieving a goal, is often non-intuitive, and sometimes even involves making destructive choices - choices that outside observers would find absurd and distasteful.

https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...

It's not only about choosing a singular goal, it's also about meticulously calculating your path there.

Don't follow the herd. The pack is FULL of jack-of-all-trades that have a smattering of random skills they picked up. Make literally every life choice with directionality and planning.

In the case of the Phoenix project, you may be misattributing what were references to Goldratt’s The Goal (almost certainly if the book is outside the technology space). Really the reference is to the underlying model, Theory of Constraints in that case. Could be happening for other examples where the book/author isn’t the primary reference.

i disagree, it isn't gobbledygook. it's not necessarily a great analogy but the underlying idea that the analogy is trying to help you remember and communicate is a reasonable and useful one:

> When evaluating past decisions or thinking about making new ones, a useful analogy to use is the flipping of the highest-order bit.

> aim to identify and flip the highest order bit because if you don't, you're not going to be able to make up for it by flipping everything else.

Other ways of trying to remember and communicate a similar idea could the "80 / 20 rule" -- e.g. small subset of effort/population/whatever often contributes disproportionately to some output.

Theory of Constraints / Eli Goldratt's book "The Goal" is another bunch of related concepts. Decide on what your big picture objective is, investigate and analyse the system to discover what the main bottleneck is. Focus on removing that bottleneck.