My first project as editorial director here at IT Revolution was to produce the audiobook version of The Phoenix Project. I have worked on many books as editor, project manager, designer, proofreader, and marketer in both print and digital. I was the primary copyeditor for The Phoenix Project back in 2012. I had never done an audiobook until now, so I thought I’d share some high points (and some low ones, too!) of the production process. To listen to part 1 of The Phoenix Project, visit … [Read more...]
Book Review: “Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate At Scale” (Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O’Reilly)
In my journey, some of the moments I treasure the most are hanging out and learning from some of the best thinkers in the DevOps community. Without a doubt, this includes Jez Humble, famous for the book he co-authored with David Farley, “Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation”. (In my opinion, Jez is not only one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, he is also one of the most decent human beings on the planet. He’s one of the co-authors … [Read more...]
Book Review: "The High Velocity Edge" by Dr. Steven Spear
In this blog post, I am going to tell you about the book The High Velocity Edge by Dr. Steven Spear. This book has influenced me tremendously, and especially for the two major projects I’m currently working on: the upcoming DevOps Cookbook (which we finally completed our first manuscript draft, which early reviewers will see sometime this week) and the upcoming 2015 State Of DevOps Survey (in collaboration with Jez Humble, Dr. Nicole Foresgren, Puppet Labs and PwC). I actually read this book … [Read more...]
Gartner Risk-Adjusted Value Model: Resource Guide for “The Phoenix Project” (Part 4)
In "The Phoenix Project," Bill and John use the GAIT-R principles and methodology (described in far more detail here) to discover how all the top company objectives on the CFO's two-page PowerPoint slide deck rely on IT. (This blog article continues the description of the "body of knowledge" that underpins "The Phoenix Project," which started in Part 1: Reading Lists, Part 2: Kanban And DevOps and Part 3: Auditing and DevOps ). Here are links to all four posts: Part 1: Where To Learn More … [Read more...]
Audit 101 For DevOps: Resource Guide for "The Phoenix Project" (Part 3: Correctly Scoping IT Using GAIT and GAIT-R)
This blog article continues the description of the “body of knowledge” that underpins “The Phoenix Project,” which started in Part 1: Reading Lists and Part 2: Kanban And DevOps. Here are links to all four posts: Part 1: Where To Learn More About Concepts In "The Phoenix Project" https://itrevolution.com/learn-more-about-concepts-in-phoenix-project/ Part 2: Kanbans https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-kanbans-part-2/ Part 3: Audit and correctly scoping the IT … [Read more...]
Kanbans and DevOps: Resource Guide for "The Phoenix Project" (Part 2)
This blog article continues the description of the "body of knowledge" that underpins "The Phoenix Project," which started in Part 1. Here are links to all four posts: Part 1: Where To Learn More About Concepts In "The Phoenix Project" https://itrevolution.com/learn-more-about-concepts-in-phoenix-project/ Part 2: Kanbans https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-kanbans-part-2/ Part 3: Audit and correctly scoping the IT … [Read more...]
The Amazing DevOps Transformation Of The HP LaserJet Firmware Team (Gary Gruver)
In this blog post, I want to share with you one of the most startling case studies of DevOps-style transformation I've ever seen. It’s a truly remarkable story for a variety of reasons: they improved the productivity of developers by 2-3x, but it wasn't for software supporting a website. Instead, it was for the firmware software that supported the enterprise HP LaserJet family of products. (Yes, the firmware that runs LaserJet printers!) This project was led by Gary Gruver (LinkedIn, … [Read more...]
How To Better Sell DevOps: The Construction Of "The Phoenix Project"
In this blog post, I will describe why we modeled "The Phoenix Project" so closely on Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt’s seminal book “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement,” how we used Dr. Goldratt’s Logical Thinking Processes to create a succinct description of the IT downward spiral that almost every organization is affected by, and then I’ll describe the resulting structure of "The Phoenix Project." One of the best validations about the way we characterized the downward IT spiral in the book is … [Read more...]
How We Used Google AdWords For Title/Subtitle Testing For “The Phoenix Project”
In this post, I will describe the six steps we went through to use Google AdWords to test titles/subtitles for "The Phoenix Project" book, how we tested with specific audiences as defined used the UX-style personas for each of the major characters in the book, how we interpreted the AdWords campaign results, and our conclusions and final decision on the book title. From start to finish, the testing campaign took three days, cost us about $500, and delivered to us data that gave us confidence to … [Read more...]
Where To Learn More About Concepts In "The Phoenix Project" (Part 1)
On behalf of my co-authors, George Spafford and Kevin Behr, thank you for all your kind words and support for The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. One of the most requested items has been a list of recommended reading and further resources to learn more about the philosophies, tools and techniques that were used in the book. This will be the first in a series of blog posts describing the “body of knowledge” that underpins the novel. In future blog … [Read more...]
