The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project, is a book well known in DevOps circles and is the de-facto must-read.

Review by: Nick Holder – Platform Development Manager

 If you’ve spent any time in an operational role, firefighting issues, you will find the situation instantly familiar: A company going through technological change and suffering from growing pains due to legacy decisions and practices.

The main character, Bill is being unexpectedly promoted and has a sudden responsibility for all IT in his organisation. The company has bet the future of the business on “The Phoenix Project” which is massively delayed and at serious risk of failing, possibly taking the company with it. Can Bill and his colleagues pull it together and deliver on that bet? Can they work out how to get all the parts of the company traveling in the same direction in time? Read and find out!

This story is a light-hearted way to introduce DevOps principles in a context that both techies and managers understand and have, in most cases, experienced. It is both an entertaining read and a cautionary tale rolled into one in such a way you forget that it has a wider message and get lost in the story, but when you reflect on it, you start seeing things in your own experiences that directly apply.

It has characters you sympathise with and you are invested into as they are so well established and familiar (you WILL start putting colleagues names on them) which will get you hooked. Along the way, you will see the effects of siloed working and siloed knowledge, technical debt and approaches to de-risk how you engage in technical work, but without realising you are sneakily being educated.

In case you didn’t get the key messages from the main text there is an appendix crystallising some of those key points. This can be useful if you want to try and promote DevOps working in your environment by providing a summary of why you may want to do this.

Massively engaging, fun (that may just be schadenfreude, though) and deceptively educational.