Have you read the famous systems-management novel The Goal? No, I know you haven’t, don’t feel bad, I only got to it this year myself.
Well, Gene Kim, entrepreneur, consultant, founder of Tripwire, and general insatiable Tweeter, has written a sequel of sorts his Visible Ops coauthors Kevin Behr and George Spafford. Bearing the tongue-twisting title The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, it’s like The Goal in that it’s written as a novel about the people in a large IT shop and how they’re faced will all the usual soul-crushing BS that we all get faced with, but use Lean and DevOps and pluck and courage to overcome it.
I got to be a pre-reader on large chunks of the book and I like it; it definitely has characters and situations directly torn from your IT department. (Man, the security guy… Just like every security guy…) And I’ve seen these techniques work, so I know it’s not just a wish-fulfillment novel.
If you’re wondering how DevOps can help you because “you live in the real world, man,” this is a good read that’ll give you some ideas along those lines! I’ve seen Gene speak at everywhere from AppSec USA to South by Southwest Interactive to DevOpsDays to Velocity… Go read the testimonials from everyone from Cockroft to Humble to even yours truly and then buy the book!
Ernest is DevOps Platform Manager for Bazaarvoice in Austin, TX.
Ernest did a great writeup here and I also wrote my own review on my personal blog > http://blog.wickett.me/post/44938190366/book-review-of-the-phoenix-project