Book Review: "The Phoenix Project"

"The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a fictional, non-technical book about an IT operations lead who inherits a poor IT infrastructure, needs to save a dying company, and does so through applying DevOps philosophies. While the book isn't directly technical, I don't think a non-technical audience would enjoy it as it deals almost exclusively with the trials of a corporate IT team. The book is roughly 350 pages and ranges anywhere from $16-$60, although I listened to it for free on Audible. Ross and I listened to the book on a road trip through California and he provides his thoughts as a DevOps guy in the review below!  The book describes every IT employee's worst nightmare and often times reality, a dysfunctional enterprise who's various IT downtime and missed deliverable are effecting the rest of the company in a noticeable way. The major issues of the book are then solved though various workflow management and DevOps theories, bringing the whole company back into profitability though optimizing IT operations. In my opinion, the book is more for IT managers or directors, covering technical topics from a mile high, rather than for those executing technical operations. I found it great from the perspective of a CEO, specifically the analogies to getting work done as an entire company and dealing with the many unforeseen issues that crop up as you attempt to charter your once clearly set business goals. The book focuses on the IT issues larger organizations tend to see and is scoped for enterprise or corporate groups as opposed to small businesses. The fictional plot reminded me of the IT version of Way of The Peaceful Warrior, with the narrator finding an enigmatic mentor who imparts many of the lessons learned, although many people have referred to it as a modern IT version of The Goal. Overall, I give it 6/10 stars because I think the theories and methodologies are important and I found the story entertaining but I thought it could have gone deeper into those theories, as opposed to it's mile high fly over of the DevOps solutions which solved their long described issues.

The book shows how to direct internal IT systems synergistically by analyzing and optimizing the development and operation of services, through the fictitious example of a car parts manufacturer. I really liked the various workflow management and DevOps theories discussed throughout the book, such as the theory of constraints, continuous integration, delivery, change management, lean manufacturing, Kanban and general team work. I especially appreciated the focus on change management and work in progress. The parts I didn't like were the constant, drawn out and dramatic fictitious conflicts that set the stage for the DevOps solutions. I also didn't appreciate how information security seemed to 'get in the way' at every turn, but appreciated its role in the larger story and life cycle of development. Normally, my reviews include the chapters of the book, to help the reader get a handle on the technology it covers in more detail, but I don't think that will help here, so instead Ross (a DevOps engineer) will provide a paragraph on his thoughts on the book!!

Ross's thoughts: "Throughout the Phoenix Project, as the main character Bill overcame problems with his team, I thought back to my previous jobs at various companies. Big, medium and small companies all had various levels of IT competency, a term used in the book to describe the ability a company had to execute on its business goals. The author highlights classic system engineering principles of bottleneck identification and common-case optimization to show how the main DevOps practices of continuous integration, deployment and automation could naturally arise as solutions. One topic the book does not dive into is the immense details on how those components come together, or how to gather support for such projects when there is too much technical debt."

In conclusion, it's a great and entertaining book, as well as thought provoking and providing inspiration for some really excellent theories. After the first chapter, the pace kept me on the edge of my seat and I couldn't wait to find out more, but towards the end it seemed long winded. If this review sounds intriguing to you, you can check out a sample of the book on their site, which is actually the entire first half of the story, or chapters 1-16 (out of 35). Enjoy the story, personally the fiction was a nice break from the standard IT book for me!