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1-Page Summary of The Phoenix Project
Overview
The Phoenix Project is a novel about how an IT department, after failing to launch its most important project on time and with the desired features, changes its management style. Bill Palmer is promoted to vice president of IT at Parts Unlimited when they’re struggling financially and trying to launch their new project. Each day brings more urgent unplanned work for which his department does not have enough resources. While working on projects for other departments that vary in appreciation for IT’s challenges, he meets a potential board member who urges him to think of his department as more like a production factory. The members try but fail to revise their change approval process and incident response while attempting two competing projects: Phoenix (their most important) and Unicorn (the least important).
When the Phoenix launch fails, the company’s CEO threatens to outsource its IT department. Another crisis arises shortly after and Palmer resigns because he can’t support his boss’ actions. Days later, the CEO apologizes for his behavior and asks Palmer to come back on board with a better understanding of how everyone works together. The IT department stops taking new work while it creates a DevOps structure that will allow it to function more efficiently in all aspects of its operations.
As the IT department begins working more cohesively, it develops new projects to push recommendations and customized discounts to customers and automate the process of setting up testing environments. The department engages in constant improvement and preventive projects, closes monitoring gaps, and randomly tests emergency and security response. Once all of these changes are made and the IT department is operating in accordance with the Three Ways of DevOps (automation, communication, collaboration), they can monitor their work better through four types: development operations, service operations, release engineering operations,and infrastructure operation. This makes them more effective at what they do. As a result of this change in how they operate,the company’s market share rises because its services become much more efficient. In addition,because it has improved so much as an organization (in terms of efficiency ),the board decides not to split up or outsource its IT division. They offer Palmer a promotion that will make him COO within two years.
Key Takeaways
Businesses must consider the importance of IT and give it autonomy to work efficiently. Development and operations should be considered as one team, not competitors. They need to cooperate in order to improve communication between departments and make it easier for them to get their job done faster.
When you’re managing a project, it’s important to know how much work is in progress and what the constraint is. The constraint determines which projects are released from the queue based on availability of resources.
Once the problem is identified, it should be exploited and worked on until the solution is found. If any work is done before that happens, it’s a waste of time.
It’s important to document the deployment pipeline in order to streamline it. As a result, tasks won’t have as much of a wait time before receiving attention from an employee who can help them advance through the pipeline. The more work that goes through this process, the longer each task will sit in line and become delayed. If the team doesn’t keep improving itself—for instance by asking for feedback or changing its processes—it becomes less effective over time because entropy makes everything slow down. The four types of work are business tasks that come from outside IT; internal IT projects; changes to software systems (bug fixes); and recovery work after system failures or crashes (incidents).
