Friday, November 13, 2015

Book: The Phoenix Project

So, the latest book I checked out happened to actually be a fiction book. More accurately, it's a nonfiction walkthrough of how to transform an IT department towards DevOps concepts wrapped in a novel that pays repeated homage to The Goal, a book I read in my Operations Management class in college.

Remember, as always, links in my book posts are affiliate links and I make the smallest amount of money possible if you were to actually buy this book.


So this book (which you can buy from this lovely affiliate link: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win) is a novel, which follows an IT leader who gets thrust into the spotlight only to find there are several problems to solve with the new organization.

Under the tutelage of a mentor who clearly loves some Lean methodology and may have read The Goal a few hundred times, the IT organization develops several DevOps capabilities and evolves to a much more efficient organization.

If you work in (or with) IT, this book is an easy read that provides (in my opinion) an accurate representation of challenges that IT faces and some potential solutions. We are actually doing a small group book study on this book at my office and it has sparked some extremely useful conversations in how we can move our IT organization forward.

I'd love to hear what you think. Go buy the book, read it, and come back and let me know your opinions. We could even start a discussion on the principles here on the site.