The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr and George Spafford

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.

More scary than most horror novels I have read.

Porn for MBAs.

The gruff-but-kind ex-Marine who is pushed into a VP of IT position, inheriting a trainwreck, then turns the organization (and the entire company!) around in less than three months by embracing DevOps. The inscrutable John Galt who swoops in on demand, Deus-ex-Machina style, gives 3-page speeches filled with Profound Management Wisdom then vanishes in a puff of smoke. The trusty lovable sidekicks who chime in at the right time with the right insights but otherwise just agree with Mr. Hero VP on everything. The sneaky traitor who works to undermine our hero but gets her comeuppance in the end. There's even the prim fussy security wonk who, halfway through, takes off his glasses and transforms into Sexy Librarian. No wait, I mean Chief Enthusiastic Acolyte Who Sees The Error Of His Past Ways. Dialog and character growth so fake you can almost hear the slap of the trowel laying it on thick.

That said: I enjoyed it. When it's not being preachy it's written in a way that demonstrates (by example) good communication habits, empathy, listening, decision-making, and a sprinkling of work/life balance. This adds credibility to the preachy parts, which really aren't that many anyway. It's a decent way to gain perspective on bad and good ways to run an organization. Plus, it's a fun read in a bubblegum sort of way.

Recommended for anyone trying to implement ITIL in an IT shop.

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.