The Phoenix Project

As an IT (by IT, I mean “SysOps”) manager, have you ever been overhelmed by monstruous releases where you have to deploy in production tonnes of code, which is so poorly written by developers that you are still skeptical how this piece of $**ù% code could ever run on the developers’ computer, and you have absolutely no idea how to run it in production without having to purchase ten times more servers, given how much the code is unoptimized.

Maybe Not ! Probably because you are a developer, and thus you can’t ever understand why it takes 3 weeks for the IT department to make such a small change like upgrading one package.

In the book The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr, it all starts when Bill takes the head as VP of IT for Parts Unlimited, a fictive big company that develops a marketing solution. Let’s pause for a second in order to let me depict the context of the main project, named Phoenix. 9 months release cycle. Impossible to ever do some A/B testing. No Key Performance Indicator goal reached cause Analytics where never priorized. IT guys always spending precious time fixing production bugs that developers have introduced, because they literally can’t wait so long for IT so they deploy on their own.

This sorrowful situation is the fitst part of the book and you, as a reader, will also suffer from it.

In contrast, it will make you so proud, when after 9 months (the second half of the book), the IT team manages to deploy 10 times a day, hand in hand with developers and other teams.

I passionatly recommend you reading this book. Even if you are a stranger to IT specific issues, It will show you how lean principles, aplied to domain that seem’s to be completly orthogonal to lean, can drmatically improve your result’s and make you sucess.