A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Kevin Behr, George Spafford, Gene Kim: Phoenix Project (2018, IT Revolution Press)
English language
Published 2018 by IT Revolution Press.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win is the third book by Gene Kim. The business novel tells the story of an IT manager who has ninety days to rescue an over-budget and late IT initiative, code-named The Phoenix Project.
Sounds like they spied on my workplace. I'm not fully certain, what exactly Phoenix meant to do, but that might be because I listened to the audio book and I missed some info due to not listening very closely all the time.
On the first night, when I opened the book, it was 22:30. I stopped reading at 1:00. On the second and third night, the story repeated. Luckily, the weekend came and I managed to get back lost sleep.
When I say exciting I'm not joking: The main character gets a sudden promotion from IT manager to VP of IT Operations in a big company ($4 billion per year). What he doesn't know is that the whole IT organization is completely crippled and he got the job is to get it healthy again.
Having to manage severity one incidents, doing weekend long deployments, getting impossible constraints and requirements from business and security are just a few of the obstacles that he encounters in his new role.
Various IT problems keep on appearing in the first part of the book. After that, things start stabilizing and you are rewarded with a happy …
On the first night, when I opened the book, it was 22:30. I stopped reading at 1:00. On the second and third night, the story repeated. Luckily, the weekend came and I managed to get back lost sleep.
When I say exciting I'm not joking: The main character gets a sudden promotion from IT manager to VP of IT Operations in a big company ($4 billion per year). What he doesn't know is that the whole IT organization is completely crippled and he got the job is to get it healthy again.
Having to manage severity one incidents, doing weekend long deployments, getting impossible constraints and requirements from business and security are just a few of the obstacles that he encounters in his new role.
Various IT problems keep on appearing in the first part of the book. After that, things start stabilizing and you are rewarded with a happy ending ;)
Although a work of fiction the book introduces various currently-used-in-IT concepts: kanban, the theory of constraints, DevOps, wait time is %busy divided by %idle, simian army, The 3 ways, the 4 types of work. People working in/with IT will appreciate the quick intro into DevOps and IT management. I doubt that non-techies will find the book interesting.
The idea that impressed me most was the comparison of the IT organization with a factory. Thinking back at my development experience, I observed that there are a lot more similarities between a factory worker and a software engineer than I'm comfortable to admit.
The main ideas are summarized at the end of the book. Along with them, you will also find the books (1, 2) that the authors used when building up the plot. I warmly recommend that you read at least this part of the book.
References
1) itrevolution.com/learn-more-about-concepts-in-phoenix-project/
2) itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-kanbans-part-2/
I'm a believer in the DevOps movement, and this book does a good job of illustrating the difference between a traditional IT operation and one that has implemented DevOps best practices. As a story, it's not that interesting, but that really wasn't the point of the book.
Finished this engrossing book in one day... Thanks Amazon for the recommendation! Didn't expect a novel based on the life of an IT Manager to be so much fun and educational.
Reading the authors' Visible Ops textbook now
Business book written as a story. Lots of good ideas, but spread out over too many pages in telling the story. I wish there was a synopsis of ideas provided, so that I didn't have to make notes all the way though.
