The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a business novel that has become essential reading in IT and DevOps circles. Bill Palmer is a midlevel IT manager at Parts Unlimited who is suddenly promoted to VP of IT Operations the same day the company’s critical Phoenix Project is in danger of catastrophic failure. Guided by a mysterious board member named Erik, Bill begins to see patterns in IT work that parallel lean manufacturing principles, leading him to develop the Three Ways: the principles of flow, feedback, and continual learning. The novel format makes abstract DevOps concepts continuous deployment, bottleneck theory, value streams tangible and memorable.