The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

I enjoyed business fiction, but it’s often done poorly. I like Patrick Lencioni, and Bob Boiki’s two books are great, but I remember reading a “business novel” by Robin Sharma once that made me want to claw my eyes out.

This is a pretty good one. It ring almost violently true – to an uncomfortable extent in places.

It involves the head of development at an auto parts supply company who is supposed to roll out a big software update, but the whole thing goes sideways in ways that are sadly predictable. The author clearly has had some experience in enterprise IT, because it’s uncanny to what I’ve seen in my career. Nothing seems out of place.

The book seems to be an extended homage to The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. That book is mentioned several times, and it uses the same thematic framing of “harried everyman is counseled by an experienced business guru.”

It turns out that this book was the lead-in to the The DevOps Handbook, which I’ve also read. It espouses the “three ways” of effective enterprise IT:

1. The Principles of Flow
2. The Principles of Feedback
3. The Prinicples of Continual Learning and Feedback

And, again, this is very much what The Goal did. The book hews so closely to the idea of enterprise IT basically being a supply chain process, that the lead character and The Guru™ visit the factory floor of their company multiple times to draw lessons from it.

It’s an enjoyable book, but so realistic that I found it hard to read sometimes. It brought back bad memories.

In the end, this is another book that’s hard to absorb by itself. You’d need to read it with a group, I think, and examine the lessons it teaches.