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The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win Paperback – October 16, 2014

by Gene Kim (Author), Kevin Behr (Author), George Spafford (Author)

2,042 customer reviews

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The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
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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.

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From the Publisher

technology, modern business, Millennials, business models, IT careers

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The Three Ways Explained | The Phoenix Project

In The Phoenix Project, we describe the underpinning principles that all the DevOps patterns can be derived from as 'The Three Ways'. It is intended to describe the values and philosophies that guide DevOps processes and practices.

The First Way is about the left-to-right flow of work from Development to IT Operations to the customer. To maximize flow, we need small batch sizes and intervals of work, never passing defects to down-stream work centers and to constantly optimize for the global goals (as opposed to local goals such as Dev feature completion rates, Test find/fix ratios or Ops availability measures).

The necessary practices include continuous build, integration and deployment, creating environments on demand, limiting work in process, and building safe systems and organizations that are safe to change.

The Second Way is about the constant flow of fast feedback from right-to-left at all stages of the value stream, amplifying it to ensure that we can prevent problems from happening again or enable faster detection and recovery. By doing this, we create quality at the source, creating or embedding knowledge where we need it.

The necessary practices include 'stopping the production line' when our builds and tests fail in the deployment pipeline, constantly elevating the improvement of daily work over daily work, creating fast automated test suites to ensure that code is always in a potentially deployable state, creating shared goals and shared pain between Development and IT Operations and creating pervasive production telemetry so that every-one can see whether code and environments are operating as designed and that customer goals are being met.

The Third Way is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation, which requires taking risks and learning from success and failure and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery.

Experimentation and risk taking are what enable us to relentlessly improve our system of work, which often requires us to do things very differently than how we’ve done it for decades. And when things go wrong, our constant repetition and daily practice is what allows us to have the skills and habits that enable us to retreat back to a place of safety and resume normal operations.

The necessary practices include creating a culture of innovation and risk taking (as opposed to fear or mindless order taking) and high trust (as opposed to low trust, command-and-control), allocating at least twenty percent of Development and IT Operations cycles towards non- functional requirements, and constant reinforcement that improvements are encouraged and celebrated.

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.

Paperback: 376 pages
Publisher: IT Revolution Press; Reprint edition (October 16, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0988262509
ISBN-13: 978-0988262508
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
Average Customer Review: 2,042 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #58,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #103 in Books > Business & Money > Industries > Computers & Technology
- #111 in Books > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Production & Operations
- #454 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business Technology

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E. Hodge

but it can become tedious when the characters "furiously take notes

June 25, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The Phoenix Project is a business book masquerading as a work of fiction. As soon as I started evaluating The Phoenix Project in the context of a business book, rather than fiction, I started enjoying it a lot more, gaining much more insight into the concepts presented, rather than focusing on the unsophisticated prose and highly contrived scenarios. The "plot" serves as a vehicle for the authors to explore and pontificate on the business ideologies presented throughout. The main character, Bill, is mentored through each of these concepts, implementing them for the benefit of the reader to see the dramatic impact each can have on a business. For the most part, this is well executed, but it can become tedious when the characters "furiously take notes, so that they can google the terms later." Yes, the authors really write this, banging the reader of the head with, "Hey Dummy, are you paying attention? This is important."

One of the best parts of the book was actually after the fictional plot ended, and the authors took the extra time to collect the concepts presented and revist them in a brief summary at the end. I hoped for this, as going back through The Phoenix Project to find each in turn, and learn more would have been difficult. If I could suggest to the authors an improvement, it would be to break the 4th wall during the fictional telling of the plot, and provide footnotes or references to the reader referencing where in the summary section they can read a bit more about a given concept. Nothing would be lost by this approach, as the reader quicky realizes the point and purpose of the plot anyways.

Overall, The Phoenix Project provides an easy way for non-business people to get their feet wet with process improvements, without making the explanations and concepts too burdensome. I find myself quoting passages with co-workers who've also read the book, realizing that all too many of the scenarios presented are real life problems we face everyday (though perhaps less severely than in the Phoenix Project.) As such, I know I've already taken something away from the book, even if I won't have a chance to master every improvement, or even experiment with them all. It provides a new way of thinking about software development, and all the organizations it impacts. Four stars.

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Wendy Cook

A fantastic book about DevOps. Ironically, it has the same flaw DevOps does...

December 1, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

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! <sighs> 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!

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Most recent customer reviews

Jonathan Heidebrink

Great book. Excellent for anyone in IT management.

This is a great book and I would recommend for anyone who is in a position of management or leadership in IT.

Published 4 days ago

Bryan

Great read

Great read. Definitely can relate to experiences in my career

Published 6 days ago

Thor I.

Great

Great book that explains how technologists do things using business terms. Makes conversation between the two a lot easier for me going forward.

Published 10 days ago

Amazon Customer

Highly recommend this book

I have ordered several copies of this "story" for business. It's really useful.

Published 12 days ago

Stephen Turley

Great book for application

Fan of the Goal when first written, this book extends that to what we need organizationally. Significant cultural challenges will be tackled with the interpersonal depictions in...Read more

Published 16 days ago

Rob

Worth Reading!

Great book! A lot of insight into the business world and how it all needs to work together.

Published 16 days ago

OnlineBuyGuy

Great book!

I kept saying to myself, is this my company that they are talking about? But then they succeeded, and I realized that it was not! :)

Published 19 days ago

Matt Roberts

A fluff book filled with an awkward narrative wrapped around common sense process recommendations.

There are so many issues with this book. Why is the IT middleware group interviewing a VP of sales? What even is the phoenix project with respect to the business in the book?Read more

Published 19 days ago

Lou

This is a greaat read. I have recommended it to many people in my office.

Published 22 days ago

K. Goslin

Informing AND entertaining

I needed a good understanding of Dev Ops fairly quickly. As a nontechnical person, this fictional novel informed me, taught me complicated concepts and kept me engaged throughout.Read more

Published 24 days ago

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