The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win 5th Anniversary Edition

This book is timely and helping to drive a movement in Business IT operations. I witnessed it once and am doing so again. In 1986 I started out work in one of the production plants of a global consumer goods business. Being an engineer but new to production control I had to learn through APICS MRP (Material Requirements Planning) and MRP 2 (Manufacturing Resource Planning). I got first hand exposure to the then horrid current state. We had over 20 000 hours of WIP and it took an average of 20 weeks lead time to get jobs through the shop. Urgency and fire fighting missed deadlines was the way of working. It was untenable as we were killing ourselves. I was fortunate to be assigned to start work on an improvement initiative. I came across and read a book that was just staring to sweep the manufacturing world at the time - called the Goal. We implemented these principles on Theory of Constraints over a period of months and eventually we reduced the WIP to 3000 hours and throughput to less than 4 weeks. It was mostly practices and understanding, advanced software sophistication like automatic schedule optimisation came only as we cleaned house and wanted further optimisation.Capitalising on this early success and riding the evolving ERP wave, I went on to eventually run global business and technology transformations. Getting to grips with building mission critical systems and delivering them for operations then updating them I always innovated and used what principles from this early learning I could to improve success and results in what limited way I could and it always worked. The issue was always a means to get broader understanding and buy in, as its "not the way it's done". I witnessed and helped the rise of the Waterfall Method with ERP and helped to necessarily transform it with hybrid agile on EPM/EDW transformation programs. I embraced the lean movement in software as an evolution to agile, and again the ground swell from the movement really helps delivering transformation program's.But still up to today broadly speaking we are missing the big picture. Seeing at least 3 distinct functions and phases from Business need, a big slow transformation delivery team - then weak hand off to operations having consumed all time and budget - to either put in lock down and eventually redo again, there has to be a better way. Business never stops, as survival depends on it, and waits for nothing. Like water, business will find a way round every obstacle and in the process the business will succeed or not. We saw the start of this block and circumvention a few years back to current time with earlier and continued adoption by business bypassing IT ops and governance with business procured Cloud solutions like CRM as corporate IT is in lock down. Often for very good and valid reasons from IT perspective. But at a real overall cost and risk to business in the big picture this is no longer an option.With the necessary formation of new organisation structures to enable fast competitive advantage, the growth of new data types and innovation everywhere - and the possibilities enabled by new technologies, it's truly necessary time to bring corporate - Enterprise IT and Business back together. Its imperative to create a true collaborative value added partnership - together. Business does need IT as everything is becoming digitised and IT must support and enable business to achieve its objectives. You don't and cannot outsource or lock down your means to innovation and you need technology to succeed. It's that simple.As with the Goal and OPT movement almost 30 years ago this book is a clever pointer to the way forwards - starting from where at least many firms would recognise today they are at. Manufacturing firms would never go back to the days of MRP and push schedules and neither would Firms already reaping advantage of this path. The book points to the future orientation of the only way strategic IT and Business will function, actionable today. The book will stimulate thought and conversation with small teams sharing a common problem of finding a way forward, and start to introduce a common language and ideas in principle that can understood discussed aligned met and experimented with small focussed steps. We now implement many of these things into our programmes and operations and seek continuously to improve further. The process works. The quicker firms and teams and new transformation programmes wake up to this, surely the better off they will be.If you are from the business or IT side of the equation, feeling stuck, pressed to do something, or just wondering what you could do or should do, and want to bring a team along with you by starting a conversation, you could do worse than circulating a copy of this book around the team and leaders - and scheduling a follow up meeting for a gentle brainstorm. You may be pleasantly surprised where you end up!

First of all, I loved the book! With The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford has written one of the most thought-provoking IT books I've read in recent years.The Phoenix Project is actually a novelization of DevOps principles rather than a strict how-to book on transforming IT Operations. It is written in the tradition of IT Novels such as the Stealing The Network series, which I read voraciously when I was learning about Information Security. I find the idea of using the genre of fiction to teach IT theory to be extremely effective, especially the concepts of DevOps, which are foreign to so many who are in the "traditional" IT space. The Phoenix Project provides a vivid use case that describes the dysfunctional relationship which exists, not only between traditional IT and the Lines of Business, but between different groups within IT itself. But not only does the book describe the problem, it offer a path to follow in order to transform IT into a true partner to the Business.The protagonist in The Phoenix Project is Bill Palmer, newly promoted to VP of IT Operations for Parts Unlimited, a leading automotive parts manufacturer and retailer. The problem is that Palmer has been promoted because his managers were fired due to the failures of the IT department, particularly in completing a software initiative, called The Phoenix Project. This Phoenix Project is a software suite, developed in-house, designed to integrate manufacturing and retail while allowing Parts Unlimited to be more agile and nimble in accommodating to changes in market conditions. The project is intended to save the company, which has missed earning consistently and has fallen behind its main competitor; unfortunately, the project is millions of dollars over-budget and years late in delivery. Palmer is thrown on to the proverbial sinking ship and quickly caught up in one emergency after another and soon realizes that unless something quickly changes, The Phoenix Project is doomed to failure and along with it, Parts Unlimited. However, Palmer finds himself ill-equipped to understand and to implement the necessary changes to right the ship, especially when there is so much distrust and infighting within the IT organization and with the Lines of Business.Then Palmer meets the enigmatic Erik Reid, a potential board member with some very unusual ideas for how to run IT Operations. Palmer is understandably skeptical but is soon drawn in as Reid takes him down the rabbit hole; through a series of encounters and events, Reid enlightens Palmer as to what is the true mission of IT and what must be done to make IT work as a partner to the Business. The truths that are discovered not only change Palmer but the entire culture of IT at Parts Unlimited.I had two different reactions as I was reading The Phoenix Project. The first half of the book often made me reflexively reach for the Maalox as I found myself standing in Palmer's shoes, reliving outages caused by buggy code and miscommunication between IT departments. The second half of the book reads like the script from The Karate Kid, as we see Erik Reid, Aka. Mr. Miyagi, guide Bill Palmer, Aka. young Daniel, down the path to enlightenment about not only the methodology of DevOps but the cultural shift that is required for change. Sometimes the lessons involve seeing tasks that seem to have little value to sound IT Operations, but Reid is able to masterfully walk Palmer through the process until he sees the proper connections between Manufacturing Plant operations and IT Operations.That relationship between Manufacturing Plants and IT was, for me, the key insight provided by the book. As Erik Reid succinctly states to Bill Palmer, "If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Your job as VP of IT Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure IT service." This is one of the best definition of IT Operations and also one of the most insightful statements on resource management that I've read to date. After all, what can be more basic to resource management, rather it be a data center, software development team, Cloud, or people, than ensuring they deliver value through the completion of planned work? Yet I would argue that because this is not the ultimate goal of many IT shops, they are easily sidetracked by the urgent and prevented from doing what is important.The rest of the book shows how Palmer, with help from Reid, is able to inculcate a new culture in the IT department at Parts Unlimited so they can focus on the mission of saving the company by enabling the business of the company. Along the way, they learn about the four categories of work (business projects, internal IT projects, changes, and unplanned work), the Three ways, and the importance of Kanban. Each new discovery by Palmer and team is a call to action for IT departments that know they cannot maintain the status quo and must transform themselves to meet the demands of the current business environment.I look forward to learning more and applying the principles from books such as the Phoenix Project. Now if only I could find a portable version of a Kanban Board!