The key ideas

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford, 2013

On his very first day in a job he never wanted, Bill Palmer learns that thousands of workers have not been paid. In ten days the company must launch a project that is two years late. The bosses demand miracles, the auditors bring almost a thousand findings, and everything rests on one engineer. Then a man in wrinkled khakis takes Bill up onto a catwalk above a plant floor and asks him whether he knows what work is.

Who it is for

For anyone drowning in urgent tasks who can't see why there are more of them every day. For leaders who feel that IT is forever getting in the way of the business. For readers who love novels where real people stand behind the office disasters.

Remember, outcomes are what matter—not the process, not controls, or, for that matter, what work you complete.

A Job He Never Asked For

“Bill Palmer here,” he says, answering his cell phone on the first ring. It's HR calling.

An hour later Bill, a thirty-nine-year-old former Marine sergeant, is sitting in the CEO's office. For ten years he has run a small group that looks after the old servers, the most reliable group in the company. As of this morning, his boss and his boss's boss no longer work at Parts Unlimited. Steve Masters, a former Army major who looks to be in his early fifties, offers Bill the job of running all of IT Operations. Steve says the board has given him six months, and nearly four thousand jobs are at stake. “Can I count on you?” And Bill hears his own voice: “Yes, sir.”

Steve wants only one thing from IT: it should be like using the toilet. You use it and never worry that it will back up and flood the entire building. “In his mind, I'm a glorified janitor,” Bill thinks.

As Bill leaves, Steve hands him a printed e-mail. The hourly workers' pay is missing from this week's payroll. The payments can only go through until five o'clock.

Part One. Balloons on the Floor

In the network operations center, fifteen or so people are shouting into the speakerphone. Wes Davis, six feet three inches tall and over 250 pounds, demands that someone get the vendor's engineer on the line. Next to him is Patty McKee, small and levelheaded. People say she loves processes more than people. “No offense, pal, but aren't you a little out of your league?” Wes says when he hears about Bill's promotion.

The evening before, Brent, the engineer without whom nothing gets done here, was upgrading the firmware on the storage system. Deciding that the storage was behind the payroll failure, he started a rollback and finished the storage off for good. In fact, a single field in the database is corrupted: instead of Social Security numbers, it holds hearts, spades and squiggles. The chief information security officer, John Pesche, young and curly-haired and never without his black binder, had urgently ordered a program that hides those numbers, to be ready for the audit. A developer installed it right before leaving on vacation. There was nowhere to test the program: there was no test environment.

By three o'clock nothing is ready, and Finance pays people from the previous payroll. Bill gets home after midnight. There are balloons on the floor and a poster in colored crayons on the wall: “Congratulations Daddy!” His wife, Paige, had invited the neighbors, and he missed his own celebration.

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About the author

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford co-wrote The Visible Ops Handbook, a guide to bringing order to IT. Since 1999, Kim and Behr have studied what sets the best IT organizations apart from the rest. The Phoenix Project came out in 2013 from IT Revolution Press in Portland.

All books by this author: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

Terms from the book

  • Phoenix
  • kanban
  • Parts Unlimited: The company where Bill works: a maker and seller of auto parts with revenue of about four billion dollars a year. Competitors are overtaking it, the stock is falling, and the board has given management six months.
  • Brent: Brent Geller, the lead engineer. He knows how almost all of the company's systems are connected, so everyone needs him at once. None of his knowledge is written down.
  • Erik Reid: A candidate for the board. He once brought order to the MRP-8 plant. He gets names wrong, talks in riddles and explains IT through the work of a plant floor.
  • MRP-8: One of the Parts Unlimited plants. From the catwalk above its floor, Erik shows Bill how work moves.
  • work in process: Everything that has been started and not finished: jobs on the plant floor, change cards, tasks in a queue. The more of it there is, the later everything else gets done.
  • Three Ways: Erik's principles. The First Way is a fast flow of work from Development to IT Operations and on to the customer. The Second is short feedback loops, so that a mistake is fixed where it arises. The Third is a culture where people experiment, learn from failure and practice a lot.
  • unplanned work: The fourth type of work: outages and firefighting. Erik calls it anti-work, because it pushes out all the planned work.
  • bottleneck: The resource on which the output of the whole system depends. According to Erik, any improvement made anywhere other than the bottleneck is an illusion.
  • Unicorn: A small project split off from Phoenix: recommendations and promotions for customers. It is deployed often and in small pieces.

All terms

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