by Gene Kim
I feel my jaw hanging open, my beer bottle dripping water onto my leg.
“You don’t have to answer now,” he says, obviously satisfied that his pitch is having the desired effect. “Half my board thinks I’m crazy. Maybe they’re right, but I trust my instincts. I don’t know how this is going to shape up, but I have confidence that this is what’s best for the company. My gut tells me that in ten years, when we’re mopping the last pieces of our competition off the floor, this is the gamble that will have made that possible.
“While we’re dreaming big dreams here, let me say this,” he continues. “In ten years, I’m certain every coo worth their salt will have come from it. Any coo who doesn’t intimately understand the it systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.”
Steve’s vision takes my breath away. He’s right. Everything my team has learned, as well as what Chris and John have learned, shows that when it fails, the business fails. It stands to reason that if it is organized so that it can win, the business wins, too.
And Steve wants to put me on the vanguard of this movement.
Me. A technology operations guy.
Suddenly, I think of how one of Erik’s higher ups decided to mustang him from a senior nco to a lowly lieutenant, forcing him to climb the ladder again from the very bottom of the officer ranks. Obviously, Erik had the courage to do it, and the rewards for him (and his family, if he has one) seem pretty evident. He’s living a life that seems to have transcended our mortal plane of existence.
As if Steve knows what I’m thinking, he says, “You know, when Erik and I first met, many months ago, he said that the relationship between it and the business is like a dysfunctional marriage—both feel powerless and held hostage by the other. I’ve thought about this for months, and I finally figured something out.
“A dysfunctional marriage assumes that the business and it are two separate entities. it should either be embedded into business operations or into the business. Voilà! There you go. No tension. No marriage, and maybe no it Department, either.”
I just stare at Steve. In some Erik-like way, something about what he says seems inescapably true.
In that moment, I decide. I’ll still have to talk with Paige, but I know with certainty that the journey Steve wants to send me on is important—both for me and my family and for my entire profession.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, solemnly.
Steve smiles broadly and stands up. When I grasp his outstretched hand, he clasps my shoulder firmly. “Good. This is going to be fun.”
Just then, the doorbell rings, and within a few minutes, the whole gang is here—Wes, Patty, John, and Chris—so are Maggie, Brent, Ann, and, holy crap, even Dick and Ron.
As the party starts to get louder and louder, each of them congratulate me, drinks in hand. It’s obvious that they knew everything already, including Steve’s startling offer to go on a three-year training plan to become the next coo.
Dick approaches me, holding a glass of scotch. “Congratulations, Bill. I’m looking forward to working closely with you in the years to come.”
Shortly, I find myself laughing with a bunch of other people, accepting their congratulations, and trading stories about the amazing journey we’ve been on.
Wes claps me on the shoulder. “Now that you’re being promoted,” he says, even more loudly and brashly than normal, “We all thought we should give you something that celebrates what we’ve accomplished. Something that you can take with you that will remind you not to forget about us, you know, little people.”
As he reaches into the box at his feet, he says, “We argued for a long time about what it should be. But in the end, it was obvious…”
When I see what he pulls out from the box, I burst out laughing.
“Your old craptop!” he exclaims, holding it high in the air. “It was a shame to make it unusable by bronzing it, but you’ve got to admit, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
In disbelief, I gape at it as everyone laughs, clapping and cheering. It really is my old laptop. Taking it from Wes, I see the broken hinge and the duct tape I put on to hold the battery in. And now the entire laptop is covered in what looks like a thick layer of gold-colored paint, and it’s mounted on a Mahogany pedestal.
At the bottom of the pedestal is a bronze label. I read aloud, “In fond memory of dearly departed Bill Palmer, vp of it Operations,” with the last year in parentheses.
“Holy crap, guys,” I say, genuinely touched at their gesture. “You make it sound like I died!”
Everyone laughs, including Steve. The evening goes by quickly, and I find myself surprised that I’m having such a good time. I’m not usually a social person, but tonight, I feel like I’m in the company of friends and colleagues who I respect, trust, and genuinely like.
Sometime later, Erik arrives. He walks over to me, pausing to scrutinize the bronzed laptop. “You know, even though I give you a fifty-fifty chance of washing out, I still believe in you,” he says, standing in front of me, taking a swig of beer. “Congratulations, kid. You deserve it.”
“Thanks,” I say, smiling broadly, genuinely touched at his faint praise.
“Yeah, well, don’t let me down,” he says gruffly. “I’ve never liked this town, and you’ll be making me fly into that godforsaken airport for years to come. If you screw this up, it will all be for nothing.”
“I’ll do my best,” I say with a surprising amount of confidence. “Wait a second. I thought you’d be coming into town anyway for our board meetings?”
“After what I’ve seen, I don’t want any part of it!” Erik says, laughing loudly. “I think Parts Unlimited is going to make a lot of money. We’ll see how good your competition really is, but my suspicion is that they’ll have no idea what hit them. For me, this isn’t just idle theory. If all goes according to plan, within a couple of weeks, I’ll likely be one of the largest investors in this company. The last thing I want is a bunch of insider information that restricts my ability to buy and sell!”
I stare at Erik. He has enough money to become one of our largest investors but still dresses like a manufacturing line worker? I never would have guessed that he cared so much about money.
Eventually I ask dumbly, “What do you mean by ‘insider information?’”
“I’ve long believed that to effectively manage it is not only a critical competency but a significant predictor of company performance,” he explains. “One of these days, I’d like to create a hedge fund that invests in companies, taking long positions on companies with great it organizations that help the business win, and short the companies where it lets everyone down. I think we’d make a killing. What better way is there to force the next generation of ceos to give a shit about it?”
He continues. “I can’t do that if I’m tied up as a board director in all these companies. Bad optics. Too much potential jeopardy with the sec, auditors, and all that.”
“Ah,” I say.
“Hey, sorry to interrupt,” John interjects, “but I wanted to congratulate you and pay my respects.” He then reaches out to shake Erik’s hand, saying, “And to you, as well, sir.”
Erik ignores his hand, staring at him up and down for a couple of moments. Then he laughs and shakes his extended hand. “You’ve come a long way, John. Well done. And by the way, I like the new look. Very Euro discotheque.”
“Thanks, Erkel,” he says, deadpan. “I couldn’t have done it without you. I’m grateful.”
“My pleasure,” Erik says jovially. “Just don’t hang out with auditors too much. It’s not good for anyone.”
John shakes his head agreeably, returning to the party. Erik turns to me and says conspiratorially, “Now that is a rather remarkable transformation, wouldn’t you agree?”
I turn around to look at John. He’s laughing and trading insults with Wes.
“So,” Erik says, interrupting my train of thought. “What are your plans for the rest
of the it organization? Given this promotion, you’ve got some positions to fill.”
I turn back to Erik. “You know, I could never have predicted this.” Erik snorts dismissively, which I ignore. “Wes, Patty, and I have talked about this a lot. I’m sure I’m going to promote Patty to be vp of it Operations. She’s the closest we have to a plant manager for it Operations, and she’ll kick ass,” I say with a smile.
“Good choice,” he responds. “She certainly doesn’t look like your typical it Operations manager, though… And Wes?”
“Believe it or not, Wes made it very clear he doesn’t want to be vp of it Operations,” I respond. With less certainty, I say, “If I’m supposed to vacate my role as cio in two years, I think Wes will have a big decision to make. If I could wave a magic wand, he’d take over for Patty as head of it Operations, and Patty will be become the next cio. But how am I ever going to get everyone ready if Steve keeps heaping more responsibilities on me?”
Erik rolls his eyes. “Give me a break. You’re bored in your current role. You’re going to become a lot less bored. Fast. And remember that there are a lot of experienced people around you who’ve been on similar journeys, so don’t be the idiot that fails because he didn’t ask for help.”
He turns to leave but then looks at me with a glint in his eye. “Speaking of helping other people, I think you owe me something.”
“Of course,” I respond sincerely, suddenly wondering if I’ve been set up from the very beginning. “Whatever you want, just say the word.”
“I need you to help me elevate the state of the practice of how organizations manage technology. Let’s face it. Life in it is pretty shitty when it’s so misunderstood and mismanaged. It becomes thankless and frustrating as people realize that they are powerless to change the outcome, like an endlessly repeating horror movie. If that’s not damaging to our self-worth as human beings, I don’t know what is. That’s got to change,” he says passionately. “I want to improve the lives of one million it workers in the next five years. As someone wise once told me, ‘Messiahs are good, but scripture is better.’”
He says, “I want you to write a book, describing the Three Ways and how other people can replicate the transformation you’ve made here at Parts Unlimited. Call it The DevOps Handbook and show how it can regain the trust of the business and end decades of intertribal warfare. Can you do that for me?”
Write a book? He can’t be serious.
I reply, “I’m not a writer. I’ve never written a book before. In fact, I haven’t written anything longer than an e-mail in a decade.”
Unamused, he says sternly, “Learn.”
Shaking my head for a moment, I finally say, “Of course. It would be an honor and a privilege to write The DevOps Handbook for you while I embark on what will probably be the most challenging three years of my entire career.”
“Very good. It’ll be a great book,” he says, smiling. Then he claps me again on the shoulder. “Go enjoy the evening. You deserve it.”
Everywhere I look, I see people who are genuinely having fun and enjoying each other’s company. With my drink in hand, I ponder how far we’ve come. During the Phoenix launch, I doubt anyone in this group could have imagined being part of a super-tribe that was bigger than just Dev or Ops or Security. There’s a term that we’re hearing more lately: something called “DevOps.” Maybe everyone attending this party is a form of DevOps, but I suspect it’s something much more than that. It’s Product Management, Development, it Operations, and even Information Security all working together and supporting one another. Even Steve is a part of this super-tribe.
In that moment, I let myself feel how incredibly proud I am of everyone in this room. What we’ve pulled off is remarkable, and even though my future is probably less certain than anytime in my career, I feel incredible excitement at the challenges the coming years are going to bring.
As I take another sip of beer, something catches my eye. A bunch of my people start to look at their phones. Moments later, on the other side of the room, one of the developers next to Brent is peering into his phone, too, with everyone huddled around him.
Old instincts kicking in, I urgently look around the room for Patty who is making a beeline toward me, her phone already in her hand.
“First off, congratulations, boss,” she says, with a half smile on her face. “You want the bad news or the good news first?”
Turning to her, I say with a sense of calm and inner peace, “What have we got, Patty?”
AFTERWORD
The Past—An Homage to The Goal
When Kevin Behr, George Spafford, and I first started writing The Phoenix Project we never suspected how quickly DevOps would be embraced by technology professionals within all types of organizations. When this book was first published in January 2013, DevOps was very much in its early years, less than four years after the famous “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr” was presented by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, and a little over two years after the first DevOpsDays conference in the United States.
However, virtually everyone in technology was already all too familiar with the problems commonly associated with Waterfall software delivery processes and large, complex, “big bang” production deployments. This dissatisfaction with the status quo was driving increased adoption of not just DevOps, but also Agile and Lean.
We knew from first-hand experience that these problems were being faced by almost every modern enterprise and across every industry vertical regardless of the size of the organization or whether it was for profit or non-profit!
This nearly universal problem led to chronic underperformance throughout the entire technology value stream, which included Development, Operations, and Information Security. But worst of all, it led to chronic underperformance of the organization these technologists all served.
With The Phoenix Project, we wanted to capture what the downward spiral looked and felt like, as well as what the surprising solutions felt like. So much about DevOps is counter intuitive, contrary to common practice, and even controversial. If production deployments are problematic, how on earth can deploying more frequently be a good idea? How can reducing the number of controls actually increase the security of our applications and environments? And can technology really learn anything from manufacturing? There are countless more examples of these difficult to believe claims.
Because we wanted to show both the problems and solutions in a recognizable and relatable form, we decided very early on that the only way we could describe with adequate fidelity the enormous complexity of this problem was in the form of novel, just like Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt did in The Goal, the seminal book he published in 1984.
The Goal helped many of us have a giant and meaningful “aha” moment. It has been credited for helping make Lean manufacturing principles become mainstream, and, since its publication, The Goal has been integrated into almost every mainstream MBA curriculum and operations management course, influencing our next generation of leaders.
When I first read The Goal around 2000, it was life changing. Even though I had never worked in manufacturing, certainly never as a plant manager, there was no doubt that this book contained lessons that were relevant to the work that we do every day in technology. For over a decade, my co-authors and I wanted to write a version of The Goal for the technology value stream—this book obviously became The Phoenix Project, the book you’re holding right now.
Dr. Goldratt passed away in 2011 but left behind an incredible legacy. I’m particularly grateful for how he made time in 2004 to talk with Kevin Behr and me. It was amazing to see how he helped continually expand the Theory of Constraints body of knowledge.
I would recommend to any one who has interest in Dr. Goldratt’s work to listen to his audiobook Beyond the Goal, which was released twenty-one years after The Goal. It brilliantly captures in one place his own lifetime of learnings, and synthesizes those learnings into a comprehensible and comprehensive whole.<
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In Beyond the Goal, Dr. Goldratt shares a story that was incredibly prescient for us. After The Goal was first published, Dr. Goldratt quickly started to receive letters in the mail about how people claimed that he must have been hiding in their manufacturing plants because he described all the problems they were facing in their daily work, as well as how the Theory of Constraints enabled them to solve their problem.
I can’t think of a better or more persuasive testament to how well Dr. Goldratt understood the universality of the root cause of the problem, as well as the rules that described a generic direction for the solution.
Without a doubt, we wrote The Phoenix Project as an homage to The Goal, hoping to show that the same principles that Dr. Goldratt espoused originally for manufacturing could be used to improve technology work as well.
As another nod to both the work of Dr. Goldratt and the way he released it, simultaneous to the publication of this new edition, we are releasing Beyond the Phoenix Project, an audio series collaboration between John Willis (co-author of The DevOps Handbook) and me. The project will cover both the figures and philosophies that serve as the foundation for the DevOps movement, including a whole module on Dr. Goldratt.
I’m so pleased that The Phoenix Project is following in the footsteps of The Goal. The Phoenix Project has sold 400,000 copies, and like The Goal, it is being integrated into MIS programs, MBA curriculums, and even computer science programs.
Sometimes, the similarities to The Goal are downright uncanny. Shortly after the publication of The Phoenix Project, we started receiving emails. Many espoused sentiments like the following, “Holy cow, you are writing about our organization—It’s like you’ve been hiding in our building. I know these characters. In fact, the application disaster in the book just happened to us.” (And incredibly, in one case, the application being deployed was even called Project Phoenix!)