The Pheonix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford
Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited and one morning while driving to the office, receives a call from the HR lead to meet her as soon as possible. Bill is scared that he might be getting fired but what happens next is worse for him – he is being promoted directly as the VP of IT operations and will directly be reporting to the CEO of the company – Steve. Bill now has to take over the phoenix project which is the code name for the IT initiative which will decide the future of the Parts Unlimited.
The fictional novel is all about how Bill learns the similarities between IT and a manufacturing plant with the help of a board member and how it changes his life and also the complete course of the company. As you read the novel, you will start to see the complexities involved in the IT operations or DevOps and have a better understanding of the challenges faced by IT.
If you are a developer and you often think “This is running on my laptop well, how difficult would it be to run it on the production server as well”, this book might give a lot of information on how difficult it would be really.
What I liked
The book intends to showcase that DevOps is an important part of the company and more should be invested in it. Authors do so by telling a (realistic) story of the company and how simple things go wrong when working in a complex environment. The story feels like it is something that would happen actually, so you are not very surprised but still hooked to know what happens next.
What I didn’t like
Usually, in the case of novels, the end of the story is the main part and the story tries to keep the reader hooked by creating suspense on what happens in the end. In the case of The Pheonix Project, the end if highly predictable and obvious. In this novel, it is the story that the author wants to focus on rather than the end. The reason I gave 4.5 stars is that I felt boring during the last few chapters and the story is being stretched unnecessarily.
Final words
I haven’t seen any other novels till now which are based on a similar theme (Let me know as well if you know more). I highly recommend this book to everyone, whether you are involved in software or not. If you belong to IT, you will enjoy reading this novel as well as get to learn new things which might help you in your job. For everyone else, you will get to see the importance of IT in the organization.
Thank you for reading 🙂
