Book review: The Phoenix Project

content/reviews/books/the-phoenix-project.md

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