Review: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a really wonderful book - if you work in technology. If you don't, it's completely inaccessible. So take this 4-star review with that audience in mind.

This book reminded me most of The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, in that it was fiction, with composite and shallow characters, designed to explain a new business process. In this case, it is the relationship between developers (people who write code) and IT (people who manage computer systems). Notable venture capitalist Mark Andreessen wrote a piece several years ago in the Wall Street Journal called Why Software is Eating the World, and this book seeks to teach us how to adjust our organizations to accommodate this.

What I found most useful in this book was not the proposed solutions as much as it was the descriptions of the problem. The composite characterizations of everything that can be wrong between Development and IT: prioritization, speed of deployment, interdependences, individuals relied upon too much, and many, many more. It gave me a great view into my customers' daily lives.

There is a companion book to this, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, which takes it out of the fictional world of this novel and into a tangible set of recommendations. But for me, for now, this was a great introduction to the world of DevOps.

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