Introduction

The Phoenix Project was written by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford, three of the thought leaders of the DevOps movement that ’ s gained so much popularity in the by few years. It ’ second written in a novel-format, which makes it a much more lease and enjoyable read than most professional books. The Phoenix Project should be taken as an engaging way to explore how seismic shifts in engineering and the convergence of several fields of analyze can be leveraged by IT to help businesses thrive. It ’ sulfur bright at doing sol, weaving together concepts from disparate fields into a cohesive system. It ’ second besides a fun way of learning about business action improvement and cultural transformation in IT. The freshness international relations and security network ’ triiodothyronine in the originality of these ideas. These are testify, decades-old concepts that have changed the course of manufacture, leadership, safety culture, security, IT operations, and software technology. however, despite being known in their fields, they have never been tied together sol neatly. The cause for the popularity of the book is that the concepts within can help any administration leverage IT to accelerate their pace by orders of magnitude while maintaining quality. Achieving this is reasonably of a Holy Grail in IT, and the clientele advantages are frightful. It besides creates the sort of carry through culture that most of us can only dream of.

Synopsis

The history revolves around Bill Palmer, an IT director who works for the fabricated aging automotive parts manufacturer, Parts Unlimited. Bill is suddenly push into the character of VP of IT after even another catastrophic IT failure causes his former superiors to be unceremoniously fired. Bill has a repute for driving excellence through the virtual application of summons and running a tight embark. Parts Unlimited CEO, Steve Masters, calls upon Bill to bring order to the chaos in IT. The site seems gloomy as the ship’s company stock is in decline, company failures make news headlines, and competitors demonstrate that they can innovate faster and provide more customer value and are coming after the company ’ mho market share. Bill reluctantly accepts the challenge to help save the caller. There is a wide range of characters that will likely remind readers of people that they ’ ve worked with at some point in their careers — and may tied be reminded of themselves. Bill ’ south leadership team is made up of Wes, the boisterous circulate systems coach, and Patty, the highly-organized stickler for processes that heads up the IT avail group. respective executives engage in power-games, and Bill finds he must work difficult to understand and address their needs. There ’ south besides Brent, the brilliant ops mastermind who has become embedded in the most critical IT processes in the company due to his endowment and in-depth cognition of the IT systems. flush more familiar are the problems the characters find themselves in throughout the ledger. Just like in the real populace, poor organizational social organization, technical debt, and tightly-coupled systems cause many of these issues. And good like in the real world, getting out of these situations is challenging because it requires high gear levels of initiation, determination, and collaboration. One of the pivotal characters is Dr. Erik Reid, an character prospective Parts Unlimited circuit board member. Erik is gradually revealed to have in-depth cognition of IT and procedure engineering as he mentors Bill and his colleagues. At crucial points, Erik introduces fresh concepts that Bill uses in his attempts to stave off the caller ’ sulfur apparently inevitable decline into obscureness. The fresh is a worthwhile take, so I ’ ll end here alternatively of continuing to recap the plot. rather, we ’ ll dig into the underlie concepts behind the reserve .

Concepts

The Phoenix Project is a fantastic presentation to several key concepts. To understand the wax context, it ’ s best to read the book and particularly the extra fabric. Consider this more of a quick character .

The Four Types of Work

Erik starts by sending Bill on a travel to uncover the four types of IT shape. Bill identifies the first base three types sanely quickly but finds the fourthly type more elusive. It international relations and security network ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate until the damaging nature of the fourth type is silent that the team can start to turn the tide. The first type of cultivate is business Projects, which help drive business processes and initiatives. These by and large involve new features aimed at providing fresh capabilities or efficiencies for customers. These are driven by commercial enterprise leaders and can be managed as projects, and are normally not tracked centrally, but rather managed by person budget owners. The second type of work is home Projects. These are by and large smaller bits of regular ferment that accumulates over time : care and upgrades of existing systems, retiring erstwhile engineering, security patches, and indeed on. This is the work that keeps the caller functioning. These can besides be planned and run in a queue of influence. Changes are the third gear type of knead and embrace bug fixes, version changes, and any improvements that are generated by the beginning two types of exploit. These are the everyday updates and defend that arise from the simple being of more applications and infrastructure. The one-fourth and most damaging type, unplanned Work, is work that is necessity because other cultivate needs to be remake, and it throws different types of work into chaos. This is the insidious, inconspicuous work that makes early plan commitments impossible to meet because it slows or blocks other kinds of work. due to its damaging impression on the early three types, Unplanned Work needs to be avoided at all costs. The point of this travel is to make it clear to Bill that making ferment visible is the first gear step in starting to make sense of it all. If existing commitments across the administration are not understand, it can ’ t be coordinated to ensure that the priorities of the broader company are being met .

Work in Process (WIP)

Erik teaches Bill that WIP is one of the ancestor causes of chronic problems with delivery and quality. failure to control WIP results in the boring, inevitable death of productivity within organizations. The Phoenix Project is a analyze of how concepts like Lean Manufacturing or the Toyota Production System are much more apposite to advanced software development than most software engineering professionals may think. This has proven to be accurate as a coevals of software engineers have adopted those ideas and made considerable gains in terms of productiveness and quality. many Agile software development methodologies, such as Scrum, incorporate these concepts american samoa well. WIP boils down to focus — or miss thence. rather of working on multiple things at once, oeuvre on one thing at a fourth dimension, and do it well the foremost clock time. That way, fewer mistakes are made, and the less sour needs to be remake. Any action that has to be repeated is deemed “ waste ” because the work performed the first time must be discarded. Lean is organized around the idea that organizations should endlessly reduce consume so that the resources saved from that can be redirected to early endeavours, such as making the process more efficient, improve tools and procedures, and conduct experiments to create fresh features or products. The Phoenix Project equitable scratches the surface of Lean, as it merely demonstrates how these practices can be applied to software development .

Kanban Boards

Bill and his colleagues finally counteract the effects of excessive WIP by creating kanbans around their teams, thereby making ferment visible and allowing them to prioritize the most valuable shape. In particular, Brent ’ sulfur time is cautiously guarded thus that he can work on the correct job. Kanban roughly translates to “ signboard ” in japanese. The basic theme is to create an well visible circuit board with every phase of your process marked from left to right. Each work item is represented by a wag associated with the person ( s ) doing the study. As the work gets completed, the tease moves to the good until the work it represents is completed. The mind is that making influence visible allows the team to see the big movie around the work being done. Doing therefore makes the serve very easy to follow, fosters better collaboration, and makes WIP very obvious.

Ten Deployments Per Day

As the efficiency gains and improvements to the development grapevine roll up, the Parts Unlimited team gets to the compass point where they can deliver much faster than the quarterly releases they started out with. however, ten-spot per day however seems out of achieve to the team. finally, they come to realize that little increments of work that are delivered frequently allow the company to maximize throughput and creates the tractability to respond to customer demand quickly. “ Ten deploys per day ” is a celebrated rallying-cry of the DevOps motion. It refers to the ability to deploy changes to production multiple times per day, as opposed to quarterly, monthly, or weekly. It ’ s not meant to be taken literally, but preferably as a milestone argue that an organization is on its way to reaching a competitive pace of delivering changes into a arrangement. unicorn companies such as Amazon and Google are celebrated for releasing thousands or hundreds of thousands of times per day. One nuance is that this doesn ’ thyroxine necessarily mean actual deployments, but quite the ability to. Continuously deploying may be rare with modern features, but bug fixes or critical patches are kinds of updates that need to flow through the arrangement promptly and safely. overall, The Phoenix Project lightly touches on this concept by illustrating the problems that arise when deployments are a significant undertake versus smooth-flowing study when this milestone is achieved .

The Theory of Constraints

It isn ’ thymine until Bill begins to grasp The Theory of Constraints ( TOC ) that he begins to point the constitution in the right focus. This is because many of the remedial actions his group takes are only irregular — without changing the way that the org works, the same problems will finally occur. By applying the TOC, they identify the actual bottlenecks in the organization and introduce the practices and processes to continually improve the flow of work and shift to a more strategic approach. The TOC can be broken down as the continual identification and removal of bottlenecks in any given organization. To be able to apply this, an understand of the arrangement itself must be acquired, which means sympathy each step in the process. This is deceptively hard because these steps are frequently hidden in peoples ’ heads. Until those steps are listed, understand, and mapped out in a succession, it ’ second tough to establish a repeatable procedure that results in consistency and quality. A practice called value-stream map is much the first gradation in applying the TOC. This is precisely what Bill and his colleagues use to understand the flow of the ferment. From there, they are able to unblock the system enough to accelerate the stream of the study .

The Three Ways

Erik spends much of the book mentor Bill through the understanding and lotion of The Three Ways, which is the underlying exemplar that makes The Phoenix Project so brawny. One of the authors describes The Three Ways as :

…the principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from, which we ’ ra using in both the “ DevOps Handbook ” and “ The Phoenix Project : A fresh About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. ” We assert that the Three Ways describe the values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, practices of DevOps, angstrom well as the prescriptive steps .

To understanding the model, imagine all sour, from origin to rescue of the final examination intersection, as a series of steps that flows from left to right. This work represents the manner of speaking of any value to customers. The notion of “ measure ” is fluent : it can be an app, a service, a physical product — basically, anything that a customer finds utilitarian. This flow is referred to as the measure flow. The Three Ways are a way to approach maximization of value delivery by optimizing the rate pour to the customer, gaining faster and deeper insights by putting monitoring mechanisms in position, and by improving and finding modern values via experiment. The Three Ways can be broken down as :

1. The First Way — Continuously find and implement ways to improve delivery. This is synonymous with the concept of Kaizen.
2. The Second Way — Get fast feedback and work from strong failure signals to ever-weaker failure signals to get advance warning of quality issues.
3. The Third Way — Use the efficiencies gained in The First Way and the safety enforced by The Second Way to introduce rapid experiments that help create qualitative gains.

The idea is that by following The Three Ways, your company will outpace competitors by orders of magnitude and will win in the marketplace by creating value for customers superior to its competitors .

Conclusion

It wasn ’ metric ton until The Phoenix Project that these ideas were woven in concert and packaged in a simpleton genial model that neatly establishes how they all fit together, and distinctly articulates the finish behind each part. Although the ideas were out there, they weren ’ thyroxine packaged in such an engage way. The book was besides written therefore that the characters, situations, and choices would be companion to readers. This can create a fundamental connection to the material because the journey is not precisely a history, but follows an emotional arc as the characters work in concert to pull themselves back from the precipice. overall, it ’ s a fantastic insertion to the concepts of DevOps, and it should help any professional involved in any expression of IT understand the bigger picture, a well as understand what a functional IT organization looks like .

Closing Thoughts

For a long time, it felt bootless to try to fight for quality. Despite the application of software engineer principles, Agile methodologies, carefully-considered architecture, and years of experience, my work still felt rushed. There was a certain inevitability that the collection of insuperable technical debt would lead to the need to rewrite or retire. Management was ever-fearful that engineers were squandering resources by blindly pursuing the shiniest fresh technical school, or possibly paragon, and endlessly trying to reduce pitch timelines. The condemnable bicycle would never end.

The Phoenix Project has had a profound effect on how I approach solve. It showed me that simultaneously building quality american samoa well as the coveted functionality into a intersection as it ’ south developed drastically reduces rework and saves clock time in the long-run. Furthermore, those savings can be re-invested into the product to improve it even more. It ’ s a pure bicycle where everybody in the company wins. It showed me that there is a better manner to build and deliver software that is fulfilling, where work can be collaborative. Where quality does matter adenine a lot as pitch. Where being depart of a memorize culture and embracing experiment and ingenuity can help any company gain. And where making things better is the shared goal of the entire company. even for skeptics, that should be enough to warrant an investigation .

Disclaimer

I ’ m an employee of IBM. The views expressed in this web log are mine and wear ’ t inevitably reflect the positions, strategies, or opinions of the company .