The Phoenix Project: A Novel About It, Devops, and Helping Your Business Win

Awesome literature, while this is about a journey of an IT department in a fictitious enterprise, it is no less than a thriller. Felt like watching a movie on the edge of my seat. Its difficult to keep it down, highly engaging at the same time never diverts away from its core theme, great technical takeaways. Each character is carefully chosen and crafted to perfection, i felt myself in the middle of these narrations, having lived through these scenes in various forms at various stages. Other than the IT operations processes it demonstrates some great leadership traits and how IT also like any other engineering discipline which needs the rigor and precision of doing things wrong. We tend to blame the technology/process, whereas we conveniently forget the human element in it and that to me is the most critical factor to manage and drive. It takes as the topmost spot in my list of favorite novels, such an easy read yet so informational and engrossing.

Show not tell is the uniqueness of this book. The problems and challenges faced by IT departments can perhaps be summarised in 4-5 bullet points. But doing so does not give the reader, esp the ones from non development backgrounds a firm understanding and the gravity of the challenges at hand. This book takes a show not tell approach as it maps out 'A day in the life of an CIO' superbly, bringing forth the challenges. It takes us thorough a journey of discovery that culminates in DevOps. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who is struggling to understand the DevOps movement. Especially to the non techie sales and marketing folks.

Good book for IT managers giving insights on inter departmental dependencies and how to tackle. Good read for budding managers.

Lots to correlate with life and work for those who are on this field. Key takeaway: We all have a Brent in our organisation on whom so much depends and who needs to be managed well for seamless workfows

Nothing interesting. It didn't give any idea to DevOps process. Just a normal Novel telling about struggling Head of IT.

Just read about 132 pages of the full 382. Fascinating insights. But unbelievable how s***ty the IT processes are in the first place at this firm. The Sales / Product folks are shown as the evil ones, but what the hell, their expectations are normal professional expectations from an IT team. Developers pushing fixes by the minute, bypassing any version control, no documentation, no testing, no quality assurance - and all this for a live mission critical system. Unbelievable context - but then what do I know? But loving the management learnings though

Highly recommend for someone who doesn't have industry experience. This will will you an insight into how things work. What are the challenges of leadership and how their decisions impact life of all workers. It's an interesting read, however I lost interest by the end., but that may be due to the fact I read it in many installments.

Extremely well written book. Portrays the happenings in an IT shop of a Corporation. Realistic depiction of the push , pull and pressure faced by the IT Managers.

I first met Gene Kim at Velocity 2011, where I saw him give a talk about operational excellence. About a year and a half later, at another event, I finally came to him and told him how angry his talk made me. At the time of his talk, what I heard him argue for is rigidity, inflexibility, and avoidance of any sort of creativity or agility. In hindsight, this is hilarious. I've got a few issues with this book; the effort to have the characters stand for a particular IT mindset resulted in all characters being cliched; Gene occasionally hits the reader over the head with a big baseball bat to make sure the reader gets the point he's trying to make. Look, I'll be honest: If Gene was trying to write a standard work of fiction, rather than a parable, I'd say he's pretty average. On the other hand, nobody's buying this book because they're looking for a good thriller to cuddle up with. Other reviewers have, far more eloquently than I could, already talked about the great points this book makes. I agree with all of them, though I'll note that I think it's one of those books you really should commit to finishing (it's not that long. It'll be easy. It's riveting), because in the process of the protagonists (Bill, Wes, Patty) getting to the desired end state, they make some decisions and turns that are decidedly suboptimal and -- frankly -- horrifying. A good example of this is deciding that the only way they can manage the impact of their star performer is by restricting access to him and requiring the approval of the VP of IT (or the star's boss) to simply TALK with him. And that's not just for the whole organization -- that's for the tier 3 engineers who are supposed to learn from him. It's a classic "we have no clue how to manage our environment, so we'll put more controls in place so we can feel we can manage what's going on" maneuver, and I really wish Gene was more explicit in calling this out as the wrong thing. Gene does get to the good stuff, though, and the thing that makes this book so fantastic -- the thing that makes me gush about this book more than I've gushed about any other management or technology book in my memory -- is that the way he does this is incredibly accessible to a broad set of people from a broad set of technology disciplines. I've done my time in a sixty year old accounting company where IT management talked ITIL all day and tried to plan work effort nine months in advance. They'll get value from this book. I work in a company at the forefront of the DevOps trend and this book verbalizes how we think about things -- and how we should continue to improve. Being an ITIL heretic (I believe ITIL's worth is not in forcing more structure, but in defining the common issues that concern everyone in technology and allowing them to collaborate better to address these issues -- almost the opposite of what most ITIL practitioners (certainly the certified ones) seem to believe); being an ardent believer in the power of superstar performers to do great things when completely unleashed from stupid, cumbersome process; and being a religious zealot when it comes to believing in the power of automation to remove the need to do the same thing a whole bunch of times (each time finding a slightly different, inconsistent solution to a problem), I've seen no manifesto that so purely distills my point of view, that so clearly speaks for me and what I believe in. Gene, I owe you a beer. Hell, most of us in technology owe you a beer.

Great book, very pleasant to read but also full of interesting cases.

Highly recommend this book for anyone who has any dealings with IT, whether you are a business person, manager or IT professional. Easy to read and understand the concepts since the entire book is an example of implementing DevOps within IT. And the cover is beautiful!

If you work in IT (heck, even if your business has any IT - so that's all of you), then you should read this book. Regardless of your specific role, I'm certain that you'll learn something useful (and more importantly, actionable). I've changed my approach to doing a few things already based on lessons I've taken from the book and I still need to process some more ideas around how to do stuff better. I expect that I'll be reading it at least one more time through so that I don't miss anything that I could make use of. One month ago, I'd never heard about this book. Of all the interesting and useful things that I took away from the Microsoft Global MVP Summit this November, I suspect that this will have the greatest impact. Fellow PowerShell MVP Steven Murawski often talks about DevOps and recommends this book in his presentations. He's such a fan of the book that he brought a bunch of copies to give out and I was very glad to receive one after hearing him extol its virtues. Having read the first few chapters on the flight back from Seattle, on landing I purchased the Kindle edition from Amazon UK so that I could carry it around on my Kindle and phone in order to reduce the barriers to being able to consume it! Personally, I love the approach that this book takes. By encompassing so much useful information about ITSM, DevOps methodologies and much more in a novel with an engaging storyline, I was able to read it much more easily and quickly that many of the dry technical texts that bog down our industry. I think that it also helped me to digest the information and apply it to my work situation more easily, even though I work in a significantly different type of organisation to that in the story. The bottom line is that this isn't just a good book, it's an important book. You should read it at the first available opportunity. We'll all be the better for it.

This book looks like telling about the devops first but actually it tells us trusted relationship among all department is the most important for Business to achieve the goal. I really enjoyed it.