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1. Essential accessible read for grasping the big picture and actionable context pointing towards the future of business and IT.
   This book is timely and helping to drive a movement in Business IT operations. I witnessed it once and am doing so again. In 1986 I started out work in one of the production plants of a global consumer goods business. Being an engineer but new to production control I had to learn through APICS MRP (Material Requirements Planning) and MRP 2 (Manufacturing Resource Planning). I got first hand exposure to the then horrid current state. We had over 20 000 hours of WIP and it took an average of 20 weeks lead time to get jobs through the shop. Urgency and fire fighting missed deadlines was the way of working. It was untenable as we were killing ourselves. I was fortunate to be assigned to start work on an improvement initiative. I came across and read a book that was just staring to sweep the manufacturing world at the time – called the Goal. We implemented these principles on Theory of Constraints over a period of months and eventually we reduced the WIP to 3000 hours and throughput to less than 4 weeks. It was mostly practices and understanding, advanced software sophistication like automatic schedule optimisation came only as we cleaned house and wanted further optimisation.Capitalising on this early success and riding the evolving ERP wave, I went on to eventually run global business and technology transformations. Getting to grips with building mission critical systems and delivering them for operations then updating them I always innovated and used what principles from this early learning I could to improve success and results in what limited way I could and it always worked. The issue was always a means to get broader understanding and buy in, as its “not the way it’s done”. I witnessed and helped the rise of the Waterfall Method with ERP and helped to necessarily transform it with hybrid agile on EPM/EDW transformation programs. I embraced the lean movement in software as an evolution to agile, and again the ground swell from the movement really helps delivering transformation program’s.But still up to today broadly speaking we are missing the big picture. Seeing at least 3 distinct functions and phases from Business need, a big slow transformation delivery team – then weak hand off to operations having consumed all time and budget – to either put in lock down and eventually redo again, there has to be a better way. Business never stops, as survival depends on it, and waits for nothing. Like water, business will find a way round every obstacle and in the process the business will succeed or not. We saw the start of this block and circumvention a few years back to current time with earlier and continued adoption by business bypassing IT ops and governance with business procured Cloud solutions like CRM as corporate IT is in lock down. Often for very good and valid reasons from IT perspective. But at a real overall cost and risk to business in the big picture this is no longer an option.With the necessary formation of new organisation structures to enable fast competitive advantage, the growth of new data types and innovation everywhere – and the possibilities enabled by new technologies, it’s truly necessary time to bring corporate – Enterprise IT and Business back together. Its imperative to create a true collaborative value added partnership – together. Business does need IT as everything is becoming digitised and IT must support and enable business to achieve its objectives. You don’t and cannot outsource or lock down your means to innovation and you need technology to succeed. It’s that simple.As with the Goal and OPT movement almost 30 years ago this book is a clever pointer to the way forwards – starting from where at least many firms would recognise today they are at. Manufacturing firms would never go back to the days of MRP and push schedules and neither would Firms already reaping advantage of this path. The book points to the future orientation of the only way strategic IT and Business will function, actionable today. The book will stimulate thought and conversation with small teams sharing a common problem of finding a way forward, and start to introduce a common language and ideas in principle that can understood discussed aligned met and experimented with small focussed steps. We now implement many of these things into our programmes and operations and seek continuously to improve further. The process works. The quicker firms and teams and new transformation programmes wake up to this, surely the better off they will be.If you are from the business or IT side of the equation, feeling stuck, pressed to do something, or just wondering what you could do or should do, and want to bring a team along with you by starting a conversation, you could do worse than circulating a copy of this book around the team and leaders – and scheduling a follow up meeting for a gentle brainstorm. You may be pleasantly surprised where you end up!

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2. An Emotional Roller Coaster
   I first met Gene Kim at Velocity 2011, where I saw him give a talk about operational excellence. About a year and a half later, at another event, I finally came to him and told him how angry his talk made me. At the time of his talk, what I heard him argue for is rigidity, inflexibility, and avoidance of any sort of creativity or agility.In hindsight, this is hilarious.I’ve got a few issues with this book; the effort to have the characters stand for a particular IT mindset resulted in all characters being cliched; Gene occasionally hits the reader over the head with a big baseball bat to make sure the reader gets the point he’s trying to make. Look, I’ll be honest: If Gene was trying to write a standard work of fiction, rather than a parable, I’d say he’s pretty average. On the other hand, nobody’s buying this book because they’re looking for a good thriller to cuddle up with.Other reviewers have, far more eloquently than I could, already talked about the great points this book makes. I agree with all of them, though I’ll note that I think it’s one of those books you really should commit to finishing (it’s not that long. It’ll be easy. It’s riveting), because in the process of the protagonists (Bill, Wes, Patty) getting to the desired end state, they make some decisions and turns that are decidedly suboptimal and — frankly — horrifying. A good example of this is deciding that the only way they can manage the impact of their star performer is by restricting access to him and requiring the approval of the VP of IT (or the star’s boss) to simply TALK with him. And that’s not just for the whole organization — that’s for the tier 3 engineers who are supposed to learn from him. It’s a classic “we have no clue how to manage our environment, so we’ll put more controls in place so we can feel we can manage what’s going on” maneuver, and I really wish Gene was more explicit in calling this out as the wrong thing.Gene does get to the good stuff, though, and the thing that makes this book so fantastic — the thing that makes me gush about this book more than I’ve gushed about any other management or technology book in my memory — is that the way he does this is incredibly accessible to a broad set of people from a broad set of technology disciplines. I’ve done my time in a sixty year old accounting company where IT management talked ITIL all day and tried to plan work effort nine months in advance. They’ll get value from this book. I work in a company at the forefront of the DevOps trend and this book verbalizes how we think about things — and how we should continue to improve.Being an ITIL heretic (I believe ITIL’s worth is not in forcing more structure, but in defining the common issues that concern everyone in technology and allowing them to collaborate better to address these issues — almost the opposite of what most ITIL practitioners (certainly the certified ones) seem to believe); being an ardent believer in the power of superstar performers to do great things when completely unleashed from stupid, cumbersome process; and being a religious zealot when it comes to believing in the power of automation to remove the need to do the same thing a whole bunch of times (each time finding a slightly different, inconsistent solution to a problem), I’ve seen no manifesto that so purely distills my point of view, that so clearly speaks for me and what I believe in.Gene, I owe you a beer. Hell, most of us in technology owe you a beer.

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3. En primer lugar aclarar que es una novela no un manual, para aquellos que desean leerlo, yo lo adquirí sabiendo esto y me resulta una lectura muy interesante y dinámica, que ayuda a conocer la cultura DevOps y comprender cómo esta cultura sirve para mejorar en muchos aspectos la TI así como muchos procesos de la operación y por ende del negocio en las compañías donde es implementada.

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4. This book presents stories and lessons very familiar to those who work with IT, either in big or small and medium companies.Addicting to read in its romance format, no matter in which area of IT you work on, frontend, backend, or something more “scientific” as developing AI models, you will absolutely learn something new and important!Apresenta histórias e lições muito familiares para quem trabalha com TI, tanto em empresas grandes quanto pequenas ou de médio porte.Viciante de ler em seu formato de “romance”, independente da área de TI que você trabalha, seja no front, no back, ou até mesmo com atividades “mais científicas”, como desenvolver modelos de IA, você irá aprender algo novo e importante com certeza!

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5. Ouvrage simple de fiction permettant d’appréhender transition agile avec exemple pris dans l’environnement industriel. La base reste Scrum dans environnement informatique mais on élargit vite très au-delà permettant de comprendre l’impact …

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6. Lectura muy interesante, el libro nos muestra el muro que existe entre Dev y Ops, y cómo poder afrontarlo, así como disfunciones del equipo.

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7. I recently read the book “Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win” and I have to say, it was a really good read. As someone who works in the IT industry, I found the book to be both informative and entertaining. The characters and their experiences were relatable, and the lessons learned were valuable. Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about IT or DevOps. It’s a great way to gain insight and improve your business practices.

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