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title = "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win - Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford"
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date = 2020-01-08
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updated = 2021-02-12
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "reviews", "devops", "phoenix", "gene kim", "kevin behr",
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"george spafford", "stars:1", "books:2020", "published:2013"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-project):
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In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps
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movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers
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will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never
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view IT the same way again.
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<!-- more -->
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{{ stars(stars=1) }}
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Let me take something out of the way from the start: This is a book with a
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fictional story, which try to explain the DevOps movement. And it age poorly.
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If we start with the fictional part, you have some guy which is promoted to VP
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of Technology and suddenly have to deal with the integration of all the IT
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parts of the company (infrastructure, development, security, business).
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Just to prove the point that any company needs DevOps 'cause every company is
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an IT company now, the story is about an auto-parts company.
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And heck if the characters are not as cliché as possible, with a few
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absurdities: The infrastructure manager is a fat guy that doesn't care about
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his appearance; there is the "evil" manager that tries to put the blame on
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everyone else but herself; the paranoid security guy (although every security
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person should be paranoid, nonetheless), which surprisingly turns into a monk
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in the middle of the book. And then you have the magical "future board member"
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that knows absolutely _everything_ about IT, but it is never asked if he
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wants to manage the IT department in the first place -- and trains the new VP
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even before becoming a board member, maybe out of purity of his heart, 'cause
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he's a "down to earth" kind of guy, but since he's filthy rich, he can do that
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('cause, you know, rich people are really willing to take their time to help
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others).
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The story is planned exactly to prove a point: Crisis emerge and are solved
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exactly in order to prove there is an order things are in the authors head --
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which becomes clear in the "Handbook", a non-fictional part in the end of the
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book. There are three ways in the way an IT department accepts DevOps and
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surely all the events happen in the same exact order.
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Another point: instead of the VP being the catalyst of the DevOps changes in
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the company, people around him start to move into DevOps without knowing: The
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manager lady simply brings kanban out of the blue, for example. And that
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"security guy turned monk", out of the blue, decided to bring the stakeholders
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into the discussion -- again, without the VP being the catalyst for it.
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In the end, everything ends fine: The VP is about to become COO, the evil lady
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gets fired, everyone is happy, everything is going, the company is making huge
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trucks of money... And nothing bad every happened: All ideas worked
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flawlessly, there were not side effects, everything is happy, with rainbows
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and candies and balloons...
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After the story, there is the "DevOps Handbook", which could be something
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usable, if it wasn't for what seems an attempt to produce more words with
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little content. There is a bunch of replicated stuff, like "a downward spiral"
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which keeps being repeated two or three paragraphs apart. You know that scene
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in "Up!", in the newsreel, which the news person says "Lutz promised he'll not
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return till he proves he's right", cutting to Lutz saying "I promise I'll not
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return till I prove I'm right"? That feels exactly like this.
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Again, the book didn't age well. There is a lot of space for pointing out
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side-effects, removing the "THIS NEW THING WILL SAVE EVERYTHING!" tone of the
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story. But, for someone who's into DevOps since 2017, the story and handbook
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seems really outdated.
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