The Phoenix project

I’ve been volunteering with the Scottish Tech Army since late August 2020. It’s a great organisation that is continuing to grow and change.

One of the cool things that pop up every so often are talks that members do about different topics. The first one I attended was on Project Management by Andrew Rendle which was fantastic. The second one I wanted to attend was a round table “introduction to Devops” hosted by Manoj Garg and Siddharth Pareek from Natwest. This seemed right up my street but I was working. I registered all the same and although I didn’t attend there was a recording. Lots of great information - Just struggled to find the time to get round to watch it!

At the end of the session Manoj showed a slide with 5 books he would recommend.

• DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim
• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble
• Project to Product By Mik Kersten
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton

I’m working my way through the books but started with the Phoenix Project as it is more of a novel..

So here is the book: The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford.

(and amazon link - which supports the wingbeat-paragliding club via an affiliate link.)

This shows the journey that Bill takes when he’s suddenly promoted to VP of IT and responsible for keeping the IT department running while delivering a delayed super big project. Lots of firefighting to start with but slowly after be ing demonstrated how factories work he starts getting people to work together. Eventually he discovers that he has been implimenting the 3 ways of DevOps.

I enjoyed the book. A lot of it was familiar from discussions we had when implimenting Agile development with TFS and later Azure DevOps at ENGL. That was at a much smaller scale to the scenarios in the book. Lots of great stuff and I’m looking at reading some of the other books by Gene Kim.