Originally published on my blog.
TL;DR
You can read all about how we implemented our 1st book club idea in our engineering team, and ...
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I also read that book recently and I did like it a lot.
What you say is common sense is not the case with a lot of people in the industry. Just like a lot of things from the DevOps movement were common sense to me over 10 years ago. But it needed the likes of The Phoenix Project to make this more clear to a lot of people. There are still people who do not know some parts of the Mythical Man Month, and think you can go faster by adding more people. And this was written 40 years ago.
The point of this was not to set arbitrary, ever inflating, goals. They do set goals, short term and achievable. They don't set goals which are 6 months or longer away. In that time the world could have changed. So you are basically wasting time by planning something which might not be relevant when you get there.
Maybe a bit. They just document how they work, and how they think no about it. DHH and Jason have strong opinions about things, and they usually put their money where their mouth is. They prove their points by still being in business and being profitable.
Most companies will need to do this at some point. They made the calculated decision to do this rather than force everybody to the new system.
But I think it sounds worse than it actually is. Iirc they only have 2 or 3 different versions. They effort to keep the old versions up and running appears to be minimal.
Prove it 😜
That's what they also said about agile and DevOps.
Maybe not all of it, but pick the things you like and try it out.
Hey Michiel,
Thanks for your comments.
I loved their two other books (Remote and Rework). This one just didn't sit well.
I say common sense probably because we do a lot of stuff that is common sense and forward thinking.
Our first book club 'book' was The Phoenix Project, so it must have set a too high bar for a 'good book'.
Either way, I agree with your statement of taking a few things and testing them out - that's the only way to know if something will indeed work in a certain organisation or not.
Hey John,
Circling back to this - did you try it on your team? How did it go?
Cool! Glad you like it - let me know how it goes 👍