A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Ratings133
Average rating4.2
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
An amazing novel about IT management and more generally all the non-manufacturing divisions of a modern company (Development, Product, Marketing, Sales, QA, Compliance...):
>> this book is totally digestible and you end up reading it like a breeze, passionated by the endeavours of the phoenix team.
>>The storytelling is a bit candid in the way the main character learn about the modern management theories through his “Sensei” but it helps the general understanding of those theories.
A great lecture that I would recommend to anyone who works with any kind of IT department/team.
The writing is sitcom bad. Bill, the main character, spouts off negative, derogatory stereotypes against some members of the IT profession that were off putting at best, and insulting at worst. Eric, Bill's mentor, is basically a jerk who enjoys the “game” of showing how much smarter he is than those around him.
Normally, in a novel this might be legitimate, but in this “teaching” story, it just undermines the actual point of the book. It's better than a textbook, but a lot of BS to wade through to get there, especially when the point of DevOps is to build bridges between operations/infrastructure and development, not burn them down.
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