The Phoenix Project - Short Book Review

The Phoenix Project - Short Book Review

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 The story is about a newly promoted IT manager who struggles to learn how to evolve outdated approaches in a big company, starting from "nothing" with plenty of legacy projects to handle, into a full DevOps based approach, with agile & lean management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: