Review – The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim,‎ Kevin Behr,‎ George Spafford (4/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Information Technology/Business/Non-fiction
Length: 345 pages
Publisher: IT Revolution Press
Release Date: January 10, 2013
ISBN-13: 978-0988262591
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Bought
Rating: 4/5 stars

“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.”

This was a good read for someone who is new to IT and Dev Ops. I recently switched into a job in IT from an engineering job. I enjoyed the parallels drawn in this book between manufacturing work and IT work; I was heavily involved in manufacturing for the first 16 years of my career and more recently involved in IT work…the comparison really helped me understand IT Dev Ops better.

The book is written in story form which makes it an easy read. Sometimes I struggle to read non-fiction books related to my job, but this one was a breeze to get through and was actually engaging. I even found myself having trouble putting it down a few times!

The back part of the book is also very useful; this is an appendix of sorts that goes through various Dev Ops and IT tools.

Overall I thought this was a great intro to Dev Ops that was very approachable and easy to read. I would recommend to people who are relatively new to the idea or field. This is a great primer that’s written in an entertaining way.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Goodreads Reading Challenge
– Mount TBR Reading Challenge