The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Gene Kim · Kevin Behr · Kim Spafford

Oct 2014 · IT Revolution

About this ebook

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. 

Ratings and reviews

I have been a Network Admin for about 15 years about 1/3 of the way through the book, I had to give up reading it because it was causing me anxiety from previous similar experiences. I guess that means I should give credit to the authors for it, it's all indeed extremely, horribly realistic. It's just not something I very much feel the need to relive seeing how I went through such situations myself and am thankfully no longer in a situation where this is my life

Great book, for some reason I simply could not put it down but maybe that is because I work in the industry! Have recommended it and would happily recommend it again. Happy reading.

This book spoke to me on so many levels! I work in a company mired in a hybrid state of the old-school and DevOps culture. We have our own Project Phoenix in the works, and this book opened my eyes to the flaws and pitfalls of any organization. I highly suggest reading this book. From the lowest Tier-1 to COO/CIOs. Thanks! Buying your other book as well!

About the author

 Gene Kim is a multiple award winning CTO, researcher and author. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years and has worked with some of the top Internet companies on improving deployment flow and increasing the rigor around IT operational processes. In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the "40 Innovative IT People Under The Age Of 40" list, and was given the Outstanding Alumnus Award by the Department of Computer Sciences at Purdue University.

Kevin Behr is the founder of the Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI) and the Chief Strategist for the CIO and Board Advisory Practice at Assemblage Pointe, where Kevin has built a unique consulting practice that mentors and coaches IT organizations to increase their business effectiveness and competitive advantage now and over the long term through the application of improvement sciences.

George Spafford is a Research Director for Gartner covering process improvement in IT operations that leverage best practice references. He is a prolific author and speaker, and has consulted and conducted training on strategy, IT management, information security and overall service improvement in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and China.