Book Review — The Phoenix Project

(cross-posted from http://blog.bamlab.fr/book-review-the-phoenix-project/)

As an IT (by IT, I mean “SysOps”) manager, have you ever been overwhelmed by monstrous releases where you had to deploy tons of code in production ? Especially when the code is so poorly written by developers that you are still skeptical about this piece of $i€ù% code could ever run on the their computer. And therefore, you had absolutely no idea how to run it in production without having to purchase ten times more servers, given how much it is unoptimised.

Maybe not ! Probably because you are a developer, and therefore you can’t ever understand why it takes three weeks for the IT department to make such a small change, like upgrading one package.

In the book The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr, it all starts when Bill takes the head as VP of IT for Parts Unlimited, a fictional big company that develops a marketing solution. Let’s pause for a second in order to let me depict the context of the main project, named Phoenix. 9 months release cycle. Impossible to ever A/B test. No Key Performance Indicator goal reached since Analytics were never prioritised. IT guys always spending precious time fixing production bugs that impatient developers have introduced.

This sorrowful situation is the first part of the book and you, as a reader, will also suffer from it.

In contrast, it will make you so proud, when after 9 months (the second half of the book), the IT team manages to deploy 10 times a day, hand in hand with developers and other teams.

I strongly recommend you reading this book. Even if you are a stranger to IT specific issues, it will show you how lean principles, applied to a domain that seem’s completely orthogonal to lean, can dramatically improve your results and lead you to success.