The Phoenix Project - Short Book Review
I'm a software developer with almost 20 years of experience, eager to share knowledge earned during my journey in programming. Lastly worked as Engineering Manager at Aterian, and previously as Staff Software Engineer at TUI Musement, CTO, tech/team leader, and software architect. I'm also an active open-source contributor & maintainer.
Recently I have read a book: The Phoenix Project by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford;
About what the book is?
It's a business novel, where fiction is used to point the reader to some of the business values, but unfortunately in my opinion it makes reading a bit harder. The story is about a newly promoted IT manager who struggles to learn how to evolve outdated approaches in a big company, starting from "nothing" with plenty of legacy projects to handle, into a full DevOps based approach, with agile & lean management technics.
From that book you will learn about:
- basics about Technical Debt,
- how unproductive meetings make morale lower,
- how "unexpected requests" can affect the work of everyone in the company,
- how a "small fix" on a production server can lead to a P1 issue for the whole weekend,
- that you probably know a person like one of the heroes of that story: Brent,
- how Bus Factor can stop all the work of the IT department,
For whom I would recommend it? For sure:
- everyone who starts her/his journey with IT,
- every developer or anyone else aspiring to become a Product Manager or Engineering Manager,
- programers or DevOps will find a lot of "memories" (good and bad as well) in that novel.
If you are interested to read more about Bus Factor, please check out this article:
