Title: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Authors: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
Edition: 4th
Year: 2024
ISBN: 978-1950508945
Introduction
After 3 different work colleagues recommended "The Phoenix Project" in a short period of time, I finally bought the Kindle edition. I initially started reading the book during vacation, thinking I would get a chapter or 2 done per night. But, I was hooked right away, as I felt I was reading the story of my current situation at work. I went in to binge-reading mode, and finished the whole book in about a week.
Review
I am not going to spoil any of the main learning points of the book. It really needs to be experienced.
The book is written as a fictional story. It starts with a fictional business on the brink of ruin and IT getting most of the blame. It ends with everyone working well together, all processes running smoothly, and the business thriving once again. The book is all about all the work and changes in between.
There is character building, though mostly in the context of the fictional business. Some characters have personality conflicts with each other. Several characters mean well but don't see they are causing blockers or bottlenecks. And among all this, there are even character epiphany moments.
The book is extremely relatable to anyone working in the DevOps area, or any IT area in general. At the end, you learn this book is a companion to "The DevOps Handbook". As of this writing, I have purchased this book but have not started it yet.
Post Mort-em
Initially I started writing down some lessons-learned notes as I was reading. Then I stopped to just concentrate on reading the story. I assumed there would be a recap at the end I could get most of the important points from there, but this was not the case. I did try to use ChatGPT and Grok to summarize the book, and they seemed to get most of the main points, but I know both of them missed some topics (for example, neither of them mentioned the 4 types of work unless I prompted for it).
Overall: I highly recommended book if you are in IT.
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