Audiobook Review: The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project is a lesson in DevOps practices in the form of a novel. It tells the story of Bill, an IT manager at an auto parts supplier who finds himself dropped into the role of VP of IP Operations after the resignation of his predecessor, as well as the CTO.

The Story

His promotion leaves Bill reporting directly to the CEO, with just ninety days to improve the department’s performance, the threat of outsourcing looming over his head.

Even before anyone else has been told of his promotion, Bill finds himself in the midst of a chain of outages and problems, which he has to get a handle on, while preventing further slippage of Project Phoenix, an aptly-named overhaul of the company’s sales backend, which is intended to pull the company out of decline and make them competitive again.

Spoiler: they don’t get outsourced. The novel takes Bill and his team from a constant state of disaster, to a smoothly functioning operation through the application of principles borrowed from lean manufacturing, with a stern sensei-like prospective board member offering Bill advice through a number of tours of the company plant. In fact, The Phoenix Project is heavily inspired by The Goal, a novel describing a similar journey for a plant manager.

I’ve been trying to up my game on the work-related reading front recently, and the form of this book was a real breath of fresh air. I’ve read a couple of programming books that try to use short stories to put their point across, but they’ve tended to feel forced, with dialogue reminiscent of a middle school play. The Phoenix Project, on the other hand, remains true to its format, and while there are key lessons being taught, it is first, and foremost a story, which made it significantly more enjoyable.

The authors do a great job of making the situations in the story believable and relatable to a technical audience. Problems that appear are realistic, without having so much detail that they require specialist knowledge to understand, and characters embody issues that many of us will be familiar with: fatalist engineers, execs with a cliched line for every situation and the overachiever who just can’t say no.

In some ways, the reliability of the story was a little surprising to me, since the perspective is very much from an IT operations standpoint, and the developers are painted as a big part of the problem in early chapters. I’ll admit that I’ve bypassed the occasional change process myself. In fact, seeing things from another direction was incredibly useful, giving me a clearer idea of the potential knock-on effects of my own actions.

I consider myself fortunate to work at a company that isn’t anywhere near as dysfunctional as Parts Unlimited was at the beginning. Still, I could still see a number of parallels with my own workplace. Which made it seem as if achieving improvements wouldn’t be as herculean a task as it was for Bill.

My only real complaint about the story is the ending, which, without giving too much away, felt a bit rushed and self-congratulatory.

The Lessons

But being a work-related book, lessons do have to be learned. The key takeaways from this book surround the Three Ways, and their application to IT operations. However, I didn’t find myself finishing the book with a firm understanding of the three ways themselves, but rather I came away with a number of ideas that I could apply to my daily work.

There were three major lessons that I came away with:

• Efficiency improvements anywhere except the bottleneck are worthless.
• Sometimes it can be worth taking a lot of short-term pain for long term benefit — illustrated in a segment about implementing monkey testing, which had everything breaking for a few days.
• Information hoarding slows everyone down, making the people with the critical knowledge a bottleneck.

The Audiobook Version

As mentioned, I “read” The Phoenix Project as an audiobook, and I can’t leave a review without mention the production.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t crazy about the reading at first: the foreword came through as a bit flat and lacked variety. But once the story itself started, the performer got into his stride and enhanced the pace of the story with inflection and tone.

This was certainly the kind of book that lent itself well to being read aloud, and I found myself powering through it in just a few days as a result.

Where to get it

The Phoenix Project is available as an audiobook via Audible, as well as in paper and e-book form from Amazon.