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The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win Hardcover – January 10, 2013

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 20,788 ratings

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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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Editorial Reviews

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"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 multi-award winning CTO, researcher, and author. He is the founder of Tripwire and served as CTO for thirteen years. His books include The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, The Visible Ops Handbook, and Visible Ops Security.

Kevin Behr is the founder of the Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI) and the general manager and chief science officer of Praxis Flow LLC. Kevin has 25 years of IT management experience and is a mentor and advisor to CEOs and CIOs. He is the co-author of The Phoenix Projectand The Visible Ops Handbook.

George Spafford is a research director for Gartner, covering DevOps, technical change, and release management, in addition to the use of bimodal IT and the pace-layered application strategy. His publications include hundreds of articles and numerous books on IT service improvement, as well as co-authorship of The Phoenix Project,The Visible Ops Handbook, and Visible Ops Security.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ IT Revolution Press; First Edition (January 10, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 345 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0988262592
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0988262591
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.38 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 20,788 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
20,788 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and easy to read. They appreciate the insightful and valuable real-world lessons it provides. Readers describe the situations as realistic and relatable. The book makes complex problems easy to understand and implement, with gradual setups and subtle explanations. Some customers find the humor amusing and riveting. However, opinions differ on the character development - some find them relatable and easy to follow, while others mention that all positive characters have military backgrounds.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

1,621 customers mention "Readability"1,564 positive57 negative

Customers find the book engaging and entertaining. They say it's well-written and hard to put down. The story introduces key concepts around devops and educates readers.

"...of IT Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the..." Read more

"...- Speed up the time it takes from implementation to deployment by reducing work in progress -..." Read more

"...Its both a good read with an interesting, if unusual, story to tell, and certainly capable of getting one to think about the right ways to approach..." Read more

"...Gene does get to the good stuff, though, and the thing that makes this book so fantastic -- the thing that makes me gush about this book more than I..." Read more

1,106 customers mention "Insight"1,087 positive19 negative

Customers find the book insightful and valuable, offering valuable real-world lessons. They appreciate the interesting ideas and demonstrating the effectiveness of Devops. The story-driven format is a great way to introduce key concepts in a digestible manner. Overall, customers find the book a clever pointer to the way forward.

"...the idea of using the genre of fiction to teach IT theory to be extremely effective, especially the concepts of DevOps, which are foreign to so many..." Read more

"...Gene Kim, is the original creator of Tripwire, a widely used tool for managing IT changes; cofounder of the company by the same name; and author..." Read more

"...through very interesting portrayals of corporate betrayals, triumphs, and even a character whom entirely changes their conception of their job and..." Read more

"...Goal and OPT movement almost 30 years ago this book is a clever pointer to the way forwards - starting from where at least many firms would..." Read more

297 customers mention "Relatability"219 positive78 negative

Customers find the book relatable. They mention the situations presented are realistic, and the book has realistic parts like terrible communication and political infighting. The primary narrative is enjoyable and the teaching was done through a dramatic, interesting story. Readers find it entertaining and eerily similar to their everyday life.

"...It's written as a fast-paced business thriller..." Read more

"...As a piece of fiction, I'm a fan of this novel. It manages to make a dramatic, interesting story about a bunch of employees in a corporation..." Read more

"...This book is essential for IT organizations as it uses real examples to show the problems IT groups face, how to overcome those challenges, and how..." Read more

"...rather than focusing on the unsophisticated prose and highly contrived scenarios...." Read more

57 customers mention "Ease of implementation"57 positive0 negative

Customers find the book easy to follow and understand. They appreciate the gradual setup that makes complex problems relatable. The story takes them through an operations implementation nightmare and provides useful tips. Readers describe the book as a mix of easy, medium, and hard intensity reading. It's a low-friction introduction to change management and process improvement.

"...It'll be easy...." Read more

"...is not just a compelling story of an IT nightmare, it's an instruction book for change...." Read more

"...Pros: shows how easy and intuitive it can be to apply leading methods and techniques from multiple disciplines, including Theory of Constraints,..." Read more

"...However, having said all of that, the book creates an instantly recognized mix of a typical IT Ops management problems and it touches the nerve of..." Read more

53 customers mention "Humor"53 positive0 negative

Customers find the book has humorous liners and engaging examples. They appreciate the novel style that keeps them from getting bored with similar books. The book's quality and relevance to the DevOps movement are also mentioned as positive aspects.

"...For me this was a humorous reminder of how bad and fragile IT can be, and a good mindset for how an org that gets a lot done should operate...." Read more

"...of this collaboration is fast flow of planned work, while increasing the reliability, stability of the production environment. 2...." Read more

"Props to goodwill. Product was labeled as 'acceptable' and came in very good condition...." Read more

"...that global best practices were woven into the story line and repeatedly reinforced...." Read more

106 customers mention "Character development"74 positive32 negative

Customers have different views on the character development. Some find the characters relatable and easy to follow, with a military background. Others feel the characters are oversimplified, thin, and lack personality beyond their job titles. The writing style is also criticised as poor.

"...It, mostly, avoids stereotypes - the characters are well-defined and have actual motivations...." Read more

"...Real-life examples make the book relatable...." Read more

"...characters stand for a particular IT mindset resulted in all characters being cliched; Gene occasionally hits the reader over the head with a big..." Read more

"...coming from but maybe commonplace in the US, all positive characters have a military background, proportional to their organizational level: the IT..." Read more

97 customers mention "Pacing"50 positive47 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's pacing. Some find the storyline engaging and entertaining, keeping them hooked throughout. Others mention typos, poor prose, and frustrating beginning chapters. The storytelling is also criticized as complacent and lacking depth.

"...This kept my attention throughout by not being boring and keeping this interesting with its twist and turns. I would recommend this book." Read more

"...He quickly regrets this - the IT organization is an underfunded disaster, with failing infrastructure, absolutely no process or change management,..." Read more

"A fun allegory of a comically dysfunctional company and broken beyond reason IT practice...." Read more

"...chapters of the book demonstrate all the bad service, terrible development practices, and daily fires that are present in a "normal shop."..." Read more

50 customers mention "Stress level"24 positive26 negative

Customers have different views on the book's stress level. Some find it gripping and well-written, describing emotional and time pressure in an IT work setting. However, others feel the last few chapters were difficult to read, with a sudden ending that some felt was too contrived.

"...It felt like a punch in the gut. I started sweating, I felt like I was going to throw up...." Read more

"...is very close to reality in terms of the fast actions, the emotional and time pressure, the pain on your private life and all the political games..." Read more

"...but, its fairytale ending - its a bit of a stretch for me (based on my own life experiences)...." Read more

"...The book manages to explain the angst, lay bare the wasted effort, inefficiencies and bottlenecks, and no matter your shop, you'll find analogies at..." Read more

This is a great book. I really like it.
5 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2013
    First of all, I loved the book! With The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford has written one of the most thought-provoking IT books I've read in recent years.

    The Phoenix Project is actually a novelization of DevOps principles rather than a strict how-to book on transforming IT Operations. It is written in the tradition of IT Novels such as the Stealing The Network series, which I read voraciously when I was learning about Information Security. I find the idea of using the genre of fiction to teach IT theory to be extremely effective, especially the concepts of DevOps, which are foreign to so many who are in the "traditional" IT space. The Phoenix Project provides a vivid use case that describes the dysfunctional relationship which exists, not only between traditional IT and the Lines of Business, but between different groups within IT itself. But not only does the book describe the problem, it offer a path to follow in order to transform IT into a true partner to the Business.

    The protagonist in The Phoenix Project is Bill Palmer, newly promoted to VP of IT Operations for Parts Unlimited, a leading automotive parts manufacturer and retailer. The problem is that Palmer has been promoted because his managers were fired due to the failures of the IT department, particularly in completing a software initiative, called The Phoenix Project. This Phoenix Project is a software suite, developed in-house, designed to integrate manufacturing and retail while allowing Parts Unlimited to be more agile and nimble in accommodating to changes in market conditions. The project is intended to save the company, which has missed earning consistently and has fallen behind its main competitor; unfortunately, the project is millions of dollars over-budget and years late in delivery. Palmer is thrown on to the proverbial sinking ship and quickly caught up in one emergency after another and soon realizes that unless something quickly changes, The Phoenix Project is doomed to failure and along with it, Parts Unlimited. However, Palmer finds himself ill-equipped to understand and to implement the necessary changes to right the ship, especially when there is so much distrust and infighting within the IT organization and with the Lines of Business.

    Then Palmer meets the enigmatic Erik Reid, a potential board member with some very unusual ideas for how to run IT Operations. Palmer is understandably skeptical but is soon drawn in as Reid takes him down the rabbit hole; through a series of encounters and events, Reid enlightens Palmer as to what is the true mission of IT and what must be done to make IT work as a partner to the Business. The truths that are discovered not only change Palmer but the entire culture of IT at Parts Unlimited.

    I had two different reactions as I was reading The Phoenix Project. The first half of the book often made me reflexively reach for the Maalox as I found myself standing in Palmer's shoes, reliving outages caused by buggy code and miscommunication between IT departments. The second half of the book reads like the script from The Karate Kid, as we see Erik Reid, Aka. Mr. Miyagi, guide Bill Palmer, Aka. young Daniel, down the path to enlightenment about not only the methodology of DevOps but the cultural shift that is required for change. Sometimes the lessons involve seeing tasks that seem to have little value to sound IT Operations, but Reid is able to masterfully walk Palmer through the process until he sees the proper connections between Manufacturing Plant operations and IT Operations.

    That relationship between Manufacturing Plants and IT was, for me, the key insight provided by the book. As Erik Reid succinctly states to Bill Palmer, "If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Your job as VP of IT Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure IT service." This is one of the best definition of IT Operations and also one of the most insightful statements on resource management that I've read to date. After all, what can be more basic to resource management, rather it be a data center, software development team, Cloud, or people, than ensuring they deliver value through the completion of planned work? Yet I would argue that because this is not the ultimate goal of many IT shops, they are easily sidetracked by the urgent and prevented from doing what is important.

    The rest of the book shows how Palmer, with help from Reid, is able to inculcate a new culture in the IT department at Parts Unlimited so they can focus on the mission of saving the company by enabling the business of the company. Along the way, they learn about the four categories of work (business projects, internal IT projects, changes, and unplanned work), the Three ways, and the importance of Kanban. Each new discovery by Palmer and team is a call to action for IT departments that know they cannot maintain the status quo and must transform themselves to meet the demands of the current business environment.

    I look forward to learning more and applying the principles from books such as the Phoenix Project. Now if only I could find a portable version of a Kanban Board!
    12 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2013
    The Phoenix Project belongs to that rare category of books: a business novel. It's written as fiction but it teaches us something serious. The most well known book in this category is The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. The Goal is a long-term best selling business book and required reading for nearly every MBA student for the last twenty-five years.

    What The Goal did for lean manufacturing, The Phoenix Project will do for managing IT.

    Bill Palmer is the reluctant protagonist who is thrust into managing IT Operations. He inherits a world of hurt: new business innovation projects are so far behind that the corporation's ability to remain competitive is threatened; standard business functions like payroll, data storage, and point of sale systems suffer from recurrent outages like lights flickering during a storm; and the whole IT organization is so buried firefighting that critical maintenance is neglected.

    I immediately resonated with the situation. In fact, if you work in a business of any size, in IT or not, you'll quickly find similarities.

    In my day job, over the years I've found myself wondering why small startups can outcompete two hundred person strong development teams, why certain deployments are multi-day affairs that nearly always fail, why we must wait months for to release software, why the releases that do get to the light of day are nearly always missing key features, and why we seem incapable of fixing bugs so awful that we drive our customers away.

    In The Phoenix Project, the protagonist Bill Palmer encounters all of this and more. It's written as a fast-paced business thriller (I couldn't put it down and spent much of Christmas day hiding from my kids to read -- in fact, once I hit the halfway point, I literally did not stop reading it except for bathroom breaks.) But it's also a serious business book about managing IT.

    Through an enigmatic board member, Bill is forced to question his assumptions about IT. What is the role of IT Operations, and even all of IT? What are the four kinds of work that IT must do? What's the silent killer of all planned work? What does the business need?

    Through comparisons with how work is managed in a factory and examples from The Goal, authors Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford show how the time tested techniques of lean manufacturing (also the Toyota Production System) apply to IT work. By applying these principles, Bill Palmer is able to:
    - Speed up the time it takes from implementation to deployment by reducing work in progress
    - Increase the amount of useful work completed by reducing dependencies on key resource bottlenecks, whether those are people, hardware, or systems
    - Reduce outages by addressing technical debt on fragile IT systems (such as old databases, tricky routers, etc.)
    - Increase the IT contribution to the business by gaining a better understand of the business requirements, and focusing effort on those features that make the largest beneficial impact to the business.

    One of the authors, Gene Kim, is the original creator of Tripwire, a widely used tool for managing IT changes; cofounder of the company by the same name; and author of The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps. I've seen him give talks on these concepts to a packed audience and receive a standing ovation.

    For years, I've wanted to be able to bring these types of ideas back to my company because I'm convinced we could be ten or a hundred times more effective and delight our customers if only we could overcome our IT dysfunctions.

    I'm thrilled to see them now in written form. If there was one book I'd want every employee of my company to read, it would be this one.
    15 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • cesar monroy perez
    5.0 out of 5 stars Interesante lectura
    Reviewed in Mexico on June 12, 2023
    En primer lugar aclarar que es una novela no un manual, para aquellos que desean leerlo, yo lo adquirí sabiendo esto y me resulta una lectura muy interesante y dinámica, que ayuda a conocer la cultura DevOps y comprender cómo esta cultura sirve para mejorar en muchos aspectos la TI así como muchos procesos de la operación y por ende del negocio en las compañías donde es implementada.
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    cesar monroy perez
    5.0 out of 5 stars Interesante lectura
    Reviewed in Mexico on June 12, 2023
    En primer lugar aclarar que es una novela no un manual, para aquellos que desean leerlo, yo lo adquirí sabiendo esto y me resulta una lectura muy interesante y dinámica, que ayuda a conocer la cultura DevOps y comprender cómo esta cultura sirve para mejorar en muchos aspectos la TI así como muchos procesos de la operación y por ende del negocio en las compañías donde es implementada.
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  • Gabriel Medina Braga
    5.0 out of 5 stars An easy read and a must for every person involved with IT companies!
    Reviewed in Brazil on December 27, 2022
    This book presents stories and lessons very familiar to those who work with IT, either in big or small and medium companies.
    Addicting to read in its romance format, no matter in which area of IT you work on, frontend, backend, or something more "scientific" as developing AI models, you will absolutely learn something new and important!

    Apresenta histórias e lições muito familiares para quem trabalha com TI, tanto em empresas grandes quanto pequenas ou de médio porte.
    Viciante de ler em seu formato de "romance", independente da área de TI que você trabalha, seja no front, no back, ou até mesmo com atividades "mais científicas", como desenvolver modelos de IA, você irá aprender algo novo e importante com certeza!
  • Jason
    5.0 out of 5 stars Interessant boek voor mensen in de IT
    Reviewed in the Netherlands on December 12, 2024
    Interessant boek voor mensen in de IT. Wellicht heb je er iets aan in je eigen werk
  • Shashank Chattopadhyaya
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great storytelling
    Reviewed in India on August 30, 2024
    Extremely captivating story that explains the benefits of treating IT as core business solution and continuous improvement. A must have book for understanding how DevOps helps an organization.
  • Serdar C
    5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
    Reviewed in Turkey on July 30, 2024
    A must read for people who want to be on the more administrative side of software development