The Phoenix Project

As a novel, this is as bad as it gets. The dialog is awful, the plot is nonsensical, and the characters are like bizarre cardboard cutouts; totally one-dimensional, yet totally unrealistic.

The message that the book is trying to get across may have been more impactful in 2013, but it feels like ancient history now in 2023. There are better books about DevOps that don't spend hundreds of pages telling a hokey story about why it's important.

One step above the typical corporate training video; sort of a casual primer on lean thinking and DevOps. Michael Crichton would’ve made it a lot more interesting.

Reading this book felt like a dejavu. So many situations the authors describe have happened almost exactly as they describe them. We've made the same mistakes and hopefully have learned from them. It's very well written and relatable. Especially people who've not have worked for 20 years in the industry might find this an interesting read to possibly understand certain situations and avoid some of the mistakes we all use to make along our way.

Strictly for those people in the IT trenches or dependent on them, this is the story of the operations difficulties that can be caused by inefficiently architected workflows of work from software development into production. There are a number of entertaining characters featured here, though I wouldn't look for a great deal of literary depth to them, and the screwups they encounter are modeled off of real-life examples the authors have known. They sort of pull their punches with every initiative the main character puts forward, which all succeed and never end up compounding the crisis (probably because any of them would have sunk the fictional company). There's a glossary at the end pointing to the most well-known business and computing books describing how to apply lean techniques to software management and a LinkedIn group devoted to this book.