Review: The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

I give this book full credit for trying to teach the ideas of DevOps in the form of a fictional novel rather than a non-fiction how-to book. A well-written story has the ability to touch you far more than an instructional book; a well-written story makes the problems and motivations seem much more believable; a well-written story sticks with you for far longer. The problem is that this is not a well-written story.

It starts out well enough–you see the pain of an IT organization drowning in tech debt–but quickly spirals into something that feels like a cheesy infomercial. The book worships the ideas of DevOps and Agile and it presents them as the solutions to all IT problems, calling them by reverent names like “The Three Ways”, having characters stare in awe at Kanban boards, and looking up to manufacturing plants as the paragons of ultimate productivity. “We had all these problems, but then we did Kanban (TM), and now everything is fixed and we lived happily ever after.” Look, Agile and DevOps are useful tools, but when you worship them like heaven-sent solutions to all IT woes, don’t adequately capture just how hard it is to migrate large organizations to new practices (which takes years, not days as in the book), and overlook all their drawbacks and pitfalls, you are doing a disservice to the industry.

To make this worse, none of the characters feel like real people. Most of them are caricatures or tropes. A few change in preposterous ways, just so they can further the storyline. A few are just downright bizarre and make you cringe every time they open their mouth. Some examples:

• The wise mentor, Erik, is a mysterious khaki-wearing genius who only speaks in inane riddles. He is smirking, pompous, and condescending to everyone, intentionally misremembers names, walks out of conversations mid-sentence, and, of course, turns out to be a multi-millionare who drives a sports car way too fast. Are we all supposed to aspire to this mysterious guru trope?

• The head of security is a total psychopath who is designed to be as unlikable as possible, doing nothing but screaming at people and creating unnecessary work and stress for the first 80% of the story. Then he has a breaking moment where he discovers that security has never done anything of value for the entire company. This causes him to lose his mind, get drunk, and disappear for days. Eventually, he comes back with a shaved head, dressed like a fashion model, and suddenly, everyone loves him. What a horrible insult to security teams. Not only are they represented as unstable lunatics, but the book says in no uncertain teams that they are totally useless. I sincerely hope no real company takes this seriously. Security in the software world is weak enough as it is. The last thing we need to do is spread the message that you can just throw the security team away if you use the magic sauce of DevOps.

• All the main characters are men. All the women are secretaries or wives, except for two. One is some sort of totally ineffective project manager until the male lead imbues her with the magic powers of Kanban. The other is the evil villain from marketing who is extremely confrontational, insults everyone she can, and tries to undermine every single effort of the IT team.

• There are only a handful of characters in the whole book, but the three most important male leads are all former military. Are we supposed to see the heroes of the book as “tough guys” or “super disciplined”? Should an IT organization be run like a military organization? Why add this totally unnecessary detail in the first place?

I’m not sure how this book became so popular in our industry. I suppose if a fairy tale is what it takes to inspire people and to make them more aware of DevOps, then that’s a good thing. But I worry that many readers won’t realize that this is, in fact, a fairy tale.

Rating: 3 stars