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Comment by chasedehan | Hacker News Reader

This whole thing goes back to the accounting process of measuring "throughput" rather than some fixed number such as inventory.

This book "The Goal" was incredibly beneficial for me in understanding the concept of throughput. While the book is a parable focused on manufacturing, it can be easily applied to companies in tech. https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...

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That book is next on my reading list, but also worth checking out is "The Phoenix Project". It applies the concepts of "The Goal" to IT (operations to start, but it gets extended to development through the book).

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...

Was just going to recommend reading this book, glad someone did already. Being in tech/IT, you will be able to identify each of the characters in your work environment at one point or another.

One of the best things about reading these books, IMO, is that I finally have the vocabulary to speak to management. Before I'd say the exact same thing, but I didn't know they had a term for what I wanted (value stream maps, for instance) and we couldn't communicate. Now that I can speak in management terms, they're listening to my inputs because we understand each other.

Eli Goldratt is an unsung hero of modern management practice. Though the Goal is his most famous work, his other books are pretty useful.

And like this throughput accounting thing, his ideas can be quite heretic in some circles.

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