The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project is one of the most interestingly written books in this genre I have ever read. It's not your typical software manager book full of dry advice, but instead follows Bill, who became a VP of IT Operations overnight and inherited a department in disarray. We follow the narrative o Bill through his eyes in a novel form. Not novel like new, but novel like, well, novel. It reads in a very different way, and so it also hits differently. It goes through all the problems you will encounter in IT (and others, I presume) departments throughout your career. Being surrounded by incompetent people, having one person who knows it all and nothing can happen without him, one team blaming the other for problems and vice versa, being over budget, missing the deadline, firefighting issues that pop up constantly,..., and how Bill would tackle them. Then you have a sage in Bob, who dealt with similar problems in a manufacturing environment and gives Bill hints on how the same ideas could work in IT.

The result is DevOps, which now became the de facto standard in the industry, especially in internet-based IT companies. I've never worked in a company where releases would be monthly or where I would need an ops person to do it. But the IT world is massive, and I'm sure many companies still haven't made this leap.

The book reminded me of several instances from my career, and I truly can not recommend it enough.