Business & Economics
IT Revolution
October 15, 2014
384
Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow, streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. 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.
The Phoenix Project is an inexplicably engrossing look at common problems that abound in the software development world. It is the fictional account of a middle manager named Bill who is promoted into a leadership role in a complete mess of a company. Bill is charged with fixing things in IT, and the problems inside and outside IT are overwhelming.
And REAL. The best thing about this book is that it points out huge problems that I have personally encountered in the software business, and it proposes logical and rational solutions that have been proven to work. The solutions often seem worse than the problems at first, but the path to efficiency and effectiveness requires a change in the way people think about software from development to deployment.
The Phoenix Project proposes a literal parallel between software development to factory operations and management. It suggests that many of the common problems in software development / IT management can be compared to problems in factory operations and that solutions to these well-understood factory operational issues can also be applied to IT. The points that the book raises are compelling and my hope is that every single person in the software business reads this book so I never have to deal with these issues again. LOL!
Anyway, great book, strangely compelling story, and I highly recommend it.