sox-404 is short for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which Congress enacted in response to the accounting failures at Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. It means the ceo and cfo have to personally sign their names, attesting that their company’s financial statements are accurate. (Location 285)

Note: SOX 404

Severity 1 outages are serious business-impacting incidents that are so disruptive, we typically drop everything to resolve them. (Location 352)

Note: Sev1 tickets

Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent. Can everything really be that important? (Location 608)

“Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.” (Location 1315)

the reference to smoke tests, a term circuit designers use. The saying goes, “If you turn the circuit board on and no smoke comes out, it’ll probably work.” (Location 1913)

Note: Smoke test

One of the problems of prevention is that you rarely know about the disasters you averted. (Location 2395)

Note: Prevention

problems, like dog poop left in the rain, rarely get better just by ignoring them. (Location 2404)

“Sensei Goldratt taught us that in most plants, there are a very small number of resources, whether it’s men, machines, or materials, that dictates the output of the entire system. We call this the constraint—or bottleneck. Either term works. Whatever you call it, until you create a trusted system to manage the flow of work to the constraint, the constraint is constantly wasted, which means that the constraint is likely being drastically underutilized. (Location 2490)

Note: Managing workload of Constraint