[Review] The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

[Updated January 15, 2013 to include link to longer excerpt - 170 pages, using the link at the end of this post.]

Last week, I read the newly released book, "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win."  This book was written by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford, who also wrote "The Visible Ops Handbook" (I was a contributing researcher on that project). 

The Phoenix Project is a business novel that takes you through a few months in the life of Bill Palmer, an IT manager at a large auto parts manufacturing company. The book begins with Bill's boss (head of IT Ops) and his boss's boss (the CIO) getting fired.  Bill gets a battlefield promotion and works directly with the CEO, who expects him to solve some serious IT problems (that threaten to destroy the business) in 90 days.

"The Goal" for Information Technology

Don't let the fact that this is a novel fool you - this is not fluff, and there is plenty of rich learning in this book.  If you've ever read "The Goal," by Dr. Eliyahu Goldrattl, you'll know that it was a business novel designed to make it easier to understand his "Theory of Constraints" (TOC) model and it succeeded in making a lot of very complex concepts approachable for business seeking to improve the performance of their manufacturing and supply chain operations.

The Phoenix Project is a lot like The Goal, in that it wraps a compelling story around such complex topics of DevOps, ITIL, Agile development processes, risk management, top-down risk-based audit scoping, and a lot more.

A captivating read, with realistic scenarios

As the story unfolds, you not only learn about these topics, you also see them in situations that you'll recognize.  I ran across quite a few scenarios that felt familiar both from my day job, as well as the work I do with enterprises and executives around the world.  In other words, the situations in the book are very real business scenarios.

The characters remind me of people I know, as well.  I had mental images of the characters as people I've worked with and you probably will, too.  After all, the stereotypical IT security curmudgeon is not just a story - and you may be surprised what happens to the head of Information Security in this book.

I read this book on the plane the other day and found myself irritated when I had to shut down my e-reader for landing because I couldn't wait to see what happened next!  I can almost see this becoming a movie at some point (though the idea of an IT-oriented feature film is probably a bit of a stretch - maybe there could be a car chase or an alien invasion or something).

Learn to improve your business

As entertaining as this book is, there is a lot to be learned from it.  In today's business world, IT is involved in almost everything we do. One of the challenges faced by many IT professionals is that the non-technical parts of the business often don't understand the linkages between IT activities and business success.  The result is IT getting the short end of the stick and starving for resources.

IT contributes to these problems, as well, because they spend a lot of time on activities that aren't "make or break" for the business so they have a hard time demonstrating value created with the budget they've been given.

The Phoenix Project hits this problem straight on and presents ways to get everyone on the same page about what's really important to the business, provides tools for IT professionals to focus on delivering meaningful results for the business, and tying all of it directly to how the business makes money by satisfying customer needs.

A must-read for IT professionals and business people alike

The principles shared in this book are critical for any business that relies on IT for its livelihood.  I recommend The Phoenix Project to every business person and IT professional that wants to increase their business performance.

If you want to see what it's like, click this link to read a brief excerpt from The Phoenix Project.

How To Stop Ruining Your Own Life

While preparing your goals for the coming year, have you reviewed what you did last year? Were you happy with the results? If the answer is no, maybe some further introspection is required - and I have a few simple questions you can use to get right to the point.

What have you done?

A long time ago, a mentor of mine used to tell me:

“Pretend that you create everything that happens to you. When you you find yourself in a situation that you're not happy with, ask yourself, 'What have I done to create the situation for myself?'  

"In most cases, you'll find something that you did - or failed to do - that brought you to this point."

I've used this technique many times on my own, and I love it.  This method forces you to turn the tables on yourself and look at things in a different light.

Once you identify what you've done to create your own bad situation, then ask yourself:

"What can I do in the future to create different outcomes that are more desirable?"

As you come up with possible solutions you want to try out, write them down and resolve to try altering your behaviors in the future.  Then, monitor yourself to see how these changes impact the outcomes.

A personal example

I used to work with someone that dumped half-finished projects in my lap and expected me to save the day by getting them done.  Because I wanted the company to be successful, I'd take them on and finish the projects, they would take credit for the results, and I'd end up really irritated.  But I kept doing it anyway (I know, shame on me).

During one of my reflection exercises, I became consciously aware of what I'd been doing.  I vowed never to make another "diving catch" to do something for this person that they should have done for themselves.  To make this easier, I came up with several useful strategies to say no gracefully and I put my new plan into practice.

A few months later, I was much happier, and this person's poor performance became noticeable enough for our boss to address it as a performance issue.

In other words, this really works (at least for me).  Let me know how it goes for you.

Comments are now enabled again on Genuine Curiosity

Just a quick note to let you know that I had a configuration problem on the site that somehow disabled comments.  This has been resolved, and you can now leave comments on posts here at Genuine Curiosity.

This was all part of a migration to an updated blog platform within SquareSpace, which is my blog provider - they made quite a few changes on their new platform (SquareSpace 6) and I'm in the middle of the learning curve.

I moved to this version because it has better mobile support, easier content "voting," and a number of other usability enhancements.  Let me know what you think of it vs. the old site, if you have an opinion.

Reflect on the old year, plan the new year

Last week, I wrote about Beeminder, to help motivate you to keep your New Year's resolutions, and a few weeks ago, I reviewed the book "Your Best Just Got Better," which is a great book to read to figure out how to set meaningful goals.

This week I want to share some tools and methods to get past the "writer's block" that often stalls people when they sit down to write their goals and resolutions.

Getting your goals out of your head

It's pretty common for people to carve out a few cycles this time of year to make plans, new year's resolutions, and such.  I'm a very visual person, so I find that using a mind map helps me organize my thoughts and stimulates my thinking.  My tool of choice is MindManager from Mindjet, but you can find lots of other mind mapping alternatives on the other end of Google (FreeMind, for example, is free and Open Source).

I organized my map into three main "zones" (which you can see in the diagram below):

1. A review of last year, where I identify highlights, lowlights, and missed opportunities
2. A look ahead to help me frame my main areas of focus (more thematic or directional in nature)
3. Making more concrete commitments I want to achieve (specific commitments and projects I want to focus on)

I've included my blank map below, and you can download my "New Year Reflection" mind map here.  You can also launch an interactive (but not editable) version of the "New Year Reflection" mind map via this link (give it a bit of time - it has to download a Flash-based player).

View fullsize

Feel free to customize it so the prompts are more meaningful to you.  And, if you use this approach, please let me know how it works out for you.

Still stuck? Try thinking about it another way...

If you'd rather think about your goals in terms of the roles and "categories" in your life, I have another template that may be useful, as well.

View fullsize

You can download my "2013 Success Planning" mind map here.  And, if you don't have MindManager or a compatible alternative, the interactive (but not editable version of 2013 Success Planning can be accessed via this link (give it a bit of time - it has to download a Flash-based player).  In this map, the "writing prompts" are in the Notes attached to each of the major categories - click on the little notepad icons and you'll see the prompts over in the notes pane on the right.

Improve the odds of keeping your New Year's resolution

It's that time of year - the time for New Year's resolutions, new promises, and fresh starts.  If you're like me, some of them work out and others don't.  What's the problem when they don't work?  For me, it can be easy to just let things slide because there aren't any consequences for being a slacker.  When they do work out, it's usually because I feel a sense of obligation or accountability, so I don't end up letting myself off the hook.

This past year, I discovered a resource that can make a big difference in your chances of success in 2013.  The tool?  Beeminder.  I've written about Beeminder before, but wanted to revisit it in the context of New Year's resolutions - I think Beeminder is one of the best tools around to maintain individual accountability.

Accountability - and consequences - matter in New Year's Resolutions

The concept behind Beeminder is pretty simple: you set a goal, you pledge some money, you use the Beeminder site to track your progress, and if you don't meet your commitment you pay up.

My commitment, as reflected in my Beeminder project this year, was to post to this blog at least 4 times per month.  There was something very motivating about having the pressure of my commitment hanging over me - Beeminder helped me establish a new set of consistent habits for writing blog posts, even if my initial pledge was $5.

Even reinforcements are not silver bullets

Even with the commitment and penalty in place, I fell off my path once along the way.  What did I do?  I got back on the horse, paid my penalty, and set a new commitment amount of $10.  That pricier commitment has been a big help - I have been consistent about posting here at least 4 times per month and, with this post, I will satisfy my 2012 goal - pretty cool.

Time to set a new goal

Now, as we move into 2013, I will be setting a new goal to keep my momentum here on the blog.  I'm planning to set a goal of at least 52 blog posts in 2013, and will maintain my current financial commitment of $10 and, of course, I'll be using Beeminder to track my progress.

If you want to learn more, there are some great examples at the Beeminder site, such as losing weight, exercising more, quitting smoking, becoming more productive, achieving financial goals, learning new languages, and a lot more.  By the way - during this year, I've interacted with the Beeminder team quite a bit.  If you have questions about how to best represent a goal on Beeminder, reach out to them - they have been extremely helpful in getting my goals to work the way I expect them to within the Beeminder system.

If you want to see what goal tracking looks like, you can see my status graph for my 2012 goal at this link.  Going forward, you can follow my 2013 goal at this link.

And stay tuned - I'm going to share some other resources to help with resolutions and productivity in my first post in 2013.