Review of
Instaread summary: The Phoenix Project A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business
Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
Five out of five stars
The book itself
is a lesson describing the value of using the Three Ways of DevOps to improve
the performance of the IT department of a company wrapped in a novel. The
company and characters are all fictional, yet like most popular writings, there
is a lot of embedded truth. In the common style of IT departments everywhere
the name of the major project, Phoenix, is taken from mythology.
The summary
itself is almost totally about the lesson, which is a positive feature, for
that is the purpose of the book. A few paragraphs are used in describing the
main characters and there are hints that there are some significant personality
conflicts taking place. It is written in a first-person narrative style where
the narrator is a former Marine and some of the other characters are also
ex-military. The reader is warned that some of the sub-stories involve military
situations and terms, so they may not be understood by all readers.
Perhaps the
most revealing section regarding the interactions of the characters appears in
the “Author’s Style” section.
“The narrator has an assertive voice and delivers many
judgments about his co-workers, some of which are harsh. He is not a paragon of
responsible behavior, particularly in the moments when he is working with the
chief information security officer and convinces him to abandon high standards
for security and prevent auditors from observing a potentially extreme
violation of customer data security.”
This is a refreshing tone of despicable reality.
Some of the
best and most effective business books were written in the style of the
substance being wrapped in a novel. Reading this summary did not convince me
that this book is one of the best but it did convince me to strongly consider
reading it.
This book was made available for free for review
purposes.
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