The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim (PDF)

Description

Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It’s Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company’s new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they’ll never view IT the same way again.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives struggling with the growing complexity of IT.” —Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO, Red Hat, Inc.”The Phoenix Project is a great way to get non-technical managers to understand what developers do. Every person involved in a failed IT project should be forced to read this book.” —Tim O’Reilly, Founder & CEO, O’Reilly Media “A must-read for anyone wanting to transform their IT to enable the business to win. Told through an absorbing story that is impossible to put down, the authors teach the essential lessons in an accessible way. Every business leader and IT professional should read this book!” — Mike Orzen, co-author of the the Shingo Prize winning book Lean IT – Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation”This book is a gripping read that captures brilliantly the dilemmas that face companies which depend on IT, and offers real-world solutions. As Deming reminds us, ‘It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.’ The Phoenix Project will have a profound effect on IT, just as Dr. Goldratt’s book The Goal did for manufacturing.” — Jez Humble, co-author of the Jolt award-winning book Continuous Delivery and Principal at ThoughtWorks Studios”This book is the modern day version of The Goal. Today, our constraints aren’t robots inside our factories, but it’s how we manage technologies like Tomcat and Java that power our most critical projects and applications. This book continues the journey that began with Shewhart, Deming, Ohno and Dr. Goldratt, and shows us how to diminish our modern constraints to help the business win.” — John Willis, VP Client Services and Enablement, enStratus, Host of “DevOps Cafe””This is the IT swamp draining manual for anyone who is neck deep in alligators.” — Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix “This is the most amazing IT book I have ever read. Though it follows a fictitious company, the events are so real life that anyone in industry is going to relate to the story. Buy this book, read this book and then hand it to a senior manager in your organization.” — Stephen Northcutt, Fellow and President, SANS Technology Institute “This insightful walk through the pain and success of business will trigger deja vu for anyone who has ever run afoul of their complete reliance in their IT organization. I see my own experiences in every stage of the story.” — Dr. Thomas Longstaff, Program Chair, Computer Science, Engineering for Professionals, The Johns Hopkins University About the Author Gene Kim is a multiple award winning CTO, researcher and author. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years and has worked with some of the top Internet companies on improving deployment flow and increasing the rigor around IT operational processes. In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People Under The Age Of 40” list, and was given the Outstanding Alumnus Award by the Department of Computer Sciences at Purdue University.Kevin Behr is the founder of the Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI) and the Chief Strategist for the CIO and Board Advisory Practice at Assemblage Pointe, where Kevin has built a unique consulting practice that mentors and coaches IT organizations to increase their business effectiveness and competitive advantage now and over the long term through the application of improvement sciences.George Spafford is a Research Director for Gartner covering process improvement in IT operations that leverage best practice references. He is a prolific author and speaker, and has consulted and conducted training on strategy, IT management, information security and overall service improvement in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and China.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐So… DevOps.DevOps is this mythical assembly line of progress that gets code from point A to point B in record time, and by record time, I mean no time. Coded, auto-tested, out the door, bing, bang, boom. The book was an entertaining read (and/or listen) and the authors cleverly couch the concepts of DevOps into a story about a failed delivery system (The Phoenix Project) built ala WaterFall, versus a new system hastily assembled (heh, see what I did there?) on an impromptu assembly line and delivered in record time, performing brilliantly – when compared to the failed behemoth Phoenix Project.So… here’s the problem with DevOps, and the problem with this book.Companies with a nightmarish legacy code base (delivered or not as-of-yet out the door) that are attempting to build DevOps are using the same people that created their behemoth nightmare in the first place. As does the company in the hypothetical story in the book. Worse. The CEO in the book is a horribly bad boss, making wrong decision after wrong decision (I am sure to ramp up the tension to illustrate the saving graces of DevOps). So, I can tell you definitively that ANY company with leadership like that would lose their brilliant techs almost immediately. The market is in desperate need of brilliant techs so there is zero possibility that they are going to stick around a cess pool of politics when they can get a signing bonus and a raise from a company already doing it better and faster, and all without the drama. I’m just saying. And in order to pull off a DevOps operation, you absolutely need brilliant techs. You need tight, well executed product code with sufficient testing hooks so you can automate as you go. So you need brilliant QA that can understand and/or code the hooks right along-side the devs.In short, you need a whole lot more than a single Brent. You just do. And to imagine that there are a room full of brilliant techs writing broken down shoddy bloated code for Phoenix, but then can turn around and write the brilliantly architected code you need for the DevOps project… well… I am able to suspend belief when called upon, but this was more like taking it out back, shooting it, and burying it six feet under. I’m just sayin’.And with that being said, I am a huge, ginormous fan of DevOps (and the book was a FUN read / listen, thus the 4 stars instead of 3). It just takes an incredible talent pool to pull DevOps off and books like this makes companies think they just have to implement this process with the talent they have and poof! instant quality software that can be delivered instantaneously! Woohoo! They would be better served facing the reality of the mess they have, caused by (possibly) a lack of reasonable process, yah, but almost certainly by lack of talent as well. That’s basically how they got where they got.Off soap box now. Doing the tango. Eating Oreos. Feel free to join!

⭐Picked up the book after reading “The Goal” because it was described as “The Goal” for IT…After reading it, I feel it fell well-short of “The Goal”. First, it looks at DevOps almost completely from the “Ops” perspective. There is very little insight provided on the “Dev” side of the equation — which, as the manager of development team, was very disappointing. Additionally, much of the “achievements” described in the story seem to happen as if by magic, with very little detail about how things were evolved from point A to point B.

⭐This was a great page-turner, that I could not put down. I don’t think I’ve ever read a 500 page book in a weekend, before. Though this is a work of fiction, I spent 4 working for a similar company with almost word-for-word the same problems and the same systems. Kanban boards and limiting WIP really helped us manage our project intake and status reporting.Of course fragile systems and constant unplanned work was a big problem for us as well. We even had to top two IT executives fired on my third day. Creating a stable, repeatable deployment process helped tremendously.This book also highlights how clueless the rest of the organization always is about IT. To them, it’s just one single kind and entity. They think it’s just easy and can never understand how projects can be late, or how systems can go down.It may stress you out a bit, but this is a very solid book.

⭐As a 10+ year career sales executive (not in tech), I confess to being painfully ignorant of the dynamics of IT Ops, Dev, Info Sec, etc. This book was recommended to me as a way to bridge the gap in my understanding, and it delivered in spades. The narrative format helped me feel the challenges in a way that I doubt a standard business book could have achieved. I highly recommend reading this if you want a layman’s understanding of DevOps and an appreciation for the IT side of your business.

⭐13hr Audible – Very nice capture of real life in IT. This has really helped me understand DevOps. I was most familiar with Ops – Systems Management processes, ITIL and such. Not that familiar with Development and truly had no idea what the term DevOps meant. I thought it was just the next flavor of Rational, and Agile development. To take a manufacturing role model and change the goals of Development from usable code to Production ready, including the infrastructure, helped me see the marriage of Development and Operations and how they can truly become agile with increased and regular changes to stay on top of the business. Great use of the approach of using a novel to tell the story. Pretty accurate on the problem descriptions and the mindset and methodology to remedy them; a bit idealistic on the happy place where everyone winds up.Unexpected Bonus: Really nice additional 2hr summary of the DevOps Handbook in the end credits describing The Three Ways.

⭐The Pheonix Project is an IT Management Fable, the characters are for the most part extreme representations of concepts and people you interact with in business. The scenarios though are all too realistic, failing companies due to poor ability to respond to the voice of the customer, overrunning major projects with no end in sight, heroics all around, a failure to understand the voice of the business with security demands, audit requirements and processes that add hours, days and months to lead times, despair and frustration from all quarters and open hostility not just between IT and the rest of the business but an IT civil war too. Yes Bill is almost magical at seeing the problems, Steve changes from antagonist to mentor too easily, I’ve never seen a change manager as willing to adapt as Patty, so on and so forth, but a story bogged down in meetings wouldn’t be of much interest. Oh and Eric. You’ll never work with Eric, if you do, follow him everywhere.With these realistic problems that no doubt face most of us the Pheonix Project lays out a number of tools and approaches that will lead the reader to think “damn, that’s a good idea” or “that’s an amazing way of looking at it”. There’s a moment in the book (I got it on kindle first, but now I have a physical copy that’s getting the highlighter treatment) where one of the executives more or less goes “well dur well done you’ve figured it out” to which another goes, “well why didn’t you think to explain this to everyone?” we often assume that the obvious is obvious to everyone, it’s like a person watching poker on TV who can see everyone’s cards going “well that outcome was obvious” clearly it wasn’t to the people playing who couldn’t see the cards.All in all this book should be a must-read for everyone in IT or work with IT, it sets out the groundwork for implementing lean principles in IT and I wish I’d read it years ago. To be honest I think anyone with aspirations to help improve workflow through an organisation should read this, and the Goal and then sit down and think about the lessons presented within.

⭐I’m a Linux sysadm in an operations team. The book is pretty much about my daily life, all the struggles and problems. Half way through the book, I started considering leaving my job and open a kebab shop instead. Characters in the book are so real, I can see all of them Mon-Fri 9am-6pm!I’m not depressed at all, no I’m fine. Really. Thanks. *inaudible weeping*

⭐The story takes place in a company besieged by the problems anyone in IT will be familiar with… Mismanaged projects, time and budget overruns, meddling managers with an inflated sense of self importance, arbitrary and un-achievable deadlines etc.The story follows the life of the newly promoted IT Manager who is tasked with solving these problems and while tackling the issues he learns about DevOps. I found the book itself to be a very entertaining read and the concepts introduced both made sense withing the context of the story and reflect the real world issues a lot of us face as well.The book does have a somewhat “accelerated” rate of adoption within the company, most real world scenarios would probably take considerably longer and be much more of a struggle with considerable more meeting – however I doubt many people who be enthralled by that. The story pacing certainly benefits from this approach.The comparisons between IT and a typical manufacturing plant makes understanding the concepts underlying DevOps easier than speaking about them in the usual IT language.I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who works in an IT / DevOps environment and wants an enjoyable read that also helps with the daily job.

⭐The really scary thing about this book is that I can recognise many of the characters, and probably name a few, from where I am!From the frantic mess of the SAN upgrade (apparently) fighting the Payroll run in the opening section (we’ve all been there, done that, got the tee shirt ), to Brent and his knowledge of everything, with nothing documented…….I grimaced at the developer who’d had to do a rushed change that broke, gone on holiday, and no-one knew. We all know that one…..Its a gripping read, though understanding the mindset of Erik the guru is hard at times, and I’d have liked a little more domestic background.

⭐I might be nearly ten years late to the party in reading this, but the hype around this work of fiction was well and truly accurate.The original concept of framing ITIL and Agile methodologies into a fictional account of business operations is brilliant. Within a few short chapters, you are absorbed into the world of Parts Unlimited.Regardless of the sector you are in, you can quickly identify your colleagues who fill the roles of Bill Palmer, Wes Davis, Patty McKee, Brent and Sarah Moulton.My copy of The Unicorn project is already purchased. I cannot wait to dip into that later this year.

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