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Book Review - The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, And Goerge Spafford

The Phoenix Project is an essential book for any executive trying to lead the high performing company. It is a really riveting novel to look deeper into the problems we face in today's two opposite objectives from the two IT organizations: Development and IT Operations. The objective of the Development team is to keep companies remain competitive by enhancing and changing codes. That of IT Operations team is to find the stability and security by not allowing changes of the codes. DevOps, a term introduced as a solution, is the key concept to resolve the two. 






This book is really similar to The Goal in that it is a novel describing the process problems and help solving them. In The Goal and The Pheonix Project both, the main character was the crucial to save the company! Bill, the newly appointed VP of IT Operations, is tasked to resolve a series of issues that are prevalent in the current organization. 1. Companies don't view IT as their core competence. 2. Development and IT Operations are suffering from having opposite goals. He utilized a concept borrowed from manufacturing to IT department: DevOps. 

DevOps creates a system where a small team of developers independently their features, validate their correctness in production-like environments, and have their code deployed into production quickly, safely, and securely. In order to achieve it, the book describes the three stages: Flow, Feedback, and Culture of experimentation and organizational learning. 

Flow enables fast work from Development to Operations to the customers.  Feedback is to enables the fast and constant feedback loop all stages of our value stream. Culture of experimentation is the creation of a generative, high-trust culture that supports a dynamic, disciplined, and scientific approach to experimentation and organizational learning. 

Following is three take away from me - 
  1. Don't limit my learning from that particular subject. I was really intrigued how manufacturing is the key for the better IT processes. Likely wise, I should broaden my scope when it comes to marketing, process improvement, strategy, not just to limit it to only technology field. 
  2.  Identify constraint - Finding out the constraint really means that I can understand the output capacity. It means I can focus more on ruthless prioritization by understanding my or the team's capacity. 
  3. Learning from failure and embrace new world fast - I was impressed by the character 'Patty' in this book. She grasped the new concept and was immediately embracing it wholeheartedly. It was particularly impressive to me since it meant she accepted that her earlier attempts were failure and was fully ready to move on. 
The Pheonix Project represents our inefficient initiatives, not just limited to IT project, but any failed projects. One of the example I was working on was P project I was involvement last year. Without knowing the limitation of our marketing tool, the team had to spend way more time for meetings. How could we correctly identify and understand the feasibility when we don't know what we don't know. I think that is going to be an interesting questions. 

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