Jan van den Berg

j11g.com

Tag: DevOps

  • The Unicorn Project – Gene Kim

    When I read The Phoenix Project last year, I was smitten. I loved the combination of using fiction to describe how to apply — management and DevOps — theory to true to life situations. So when the publisher asked if I wanted to review the follow-up, I didn’t hesitate. And I can safely say The Unicorn Project is just as much fun as its predecessor.

    The Unicorn Project – Gene Kim (2019) – 406 pages

    This fiction book takes place in the same universe as The Phoenix Project. Actually: the same company and even the same timeline. However the protagonist this time is female — Maxime Chambers — which is a welcome change.

    The Unicorn Project builds a fictionalised business war story around DevOps theory.

    A large incumbent auto parts manufacturer struggles to keep up with changing markets. And the hero of the story is given a thankless project and is told to keep her head down. But she doesn’t! She assembles a team and guided by the mysterious Erik Reid and his Five Ideals (and later the Three Horizons) she sets out to change the course of her project — and subsequently the company!

    The reason why I love it so much, is because even though it is fiction the described situations are just too real. I know them all too well. And The Unicorn Project provides insight for how to deal with these situations. It does so by applying the Five Ideals.

    Five Ideals

    The main plot is built around seeing the application of these ideals unfold and their beneficial consequences.

    Gene Kim has defined the following Five Ideals:

    • The First Ideal is Locality and Simplicity
    • The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy
    • The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work
    • The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety
    • The Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus

    I will not go into detail about the definition and application of the Five Ideals — you should read the book! — but you can take an educated guess from their description what they mean.

    And here is the author himself, giving some background information:

    I’ve identified values and principles I call the Five Ideals to frame today’s most important IT challenges impacting engineering and business. … My main objective is to confirm the importance of the DevOps movement as a better way of working, and delivering better value, sooner, safer, and happier. I do this by addressing what I call the invisible structures, the architecture, needed to enable developers’ productivity and to scale DevOps across large organizations.

    Gene Kim

    Plot and references

    The Unicorn Project is on the intersection of these things. Which make it pretty unique.

    Saying there is a happy ending, is probably not a spoiler. The plot is the vehicle for carrying and embodying the DevOps concepts. My only critique is that the book is so chuck full of management and pop cultural references that their application to the story sometimes feel contrived. But not to a fault.

    (And apart from that, I kept expecting the CISO to show up and complicating things. But he didn’t?)

    I really love the References in the back of the book. I’m a sucker for references and further reading. And I now have a large YouTube playlist with talks about concepts in the book.

    Functional programming

    Of all the references and concepts mentioned, one in particular popped out: the author’s clear love for functional programming, and Clojure in particular. So I did some digging and sure enough, Gene Kim loves Clojure!

    Here he is explaining his love for Clojure:

    Bonus: the references from chapter 7 point to a talk by Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure), which is just a phenomenal talk.

    Reading The Unicorn Project, will leave you smarter and energized to take on challenges you or your company might face. Go read it!

  • The Phoenix Project

    When a co-worker handed me a copy of The Phoenix Project, the 8-bit art on the cover looked fun. But the tagline — ‘A Novel About IT, DevOps and Helping your Business Win’ — sounded a bit like the usual buzzword management lingo. But I was clearly wrong, I loved this book!

    It is unlike anything I’ve read before and it really spoke to me because the situations were so incredibly recognizable. The book tells a fictionalized story where the main character, Bill, gets promoted — more or less against his will — to VP IT Operations and subsequently inherits a bit of a mess. Things keeps breaking and escalating, causing SEV-1 outages all while the billion dollar company is having a bad couple of quarters and put all their hope on Project Phoenix. An IT project that is supposed to solve anything and everything; already three years in the making and nowhere close to be finished.

    The story revolves around Bill and his struggle of how to turn things around. On his path to discovery he is mentored by an eccentric figure called Eric (who is such a great and funny character).

    https://www.magnusdelta.com/blog/2017/9/16/thephoenixprojectsummary

    I feel like Bill and I have a lot in common, mainly because the book is really spot on when describing situations IT departments can find themselves in. Some scenes were a literal copy of things I have experienced. As if the writers were there and took notes. It made me laugh out loud or raise my eyebrows on more than one occasion. The reliance on certain key-figures, the disruption of self-involved Marketing/Sales people, the office politics, the lack of trust in teams, the weight of technical debt, the difference between requirements and customer needs. It was all too familiar. So for me the power of the book is the true-to-life examples, because those provide the basis for arguing the successful application of the theory.

    Because the book is in fact the theory of DevOps compiled into an exciting story. Which is a lot more fun than it sounds.

    Actually the book could be seen as a modern day version of The Goal by Dr. Goldratt — a book that handles the Theory of Constraints — which I had of course heard of, but never read. The writers of The Phoenix Project make no secret of their admiration for Goldratts’ theory. But DevOps is of course a thing of its own. A relatively new paradigm, borrowing from TOC, Lean and Agile principles among other things. Its goal is ‘to aim at shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, in close alignment with business objectives’. And where The Three Ways theory is a central aspect, unifying culture with production flow. The book shows how those theoretic mechanics work in practice. And that IT is closer to manufacturing than you might think; by breaking down the four different types of work there are in IT. That was actually an eye-opener for me. But I won’t go into too much detail about DevOps, I just wanted to point you in the right direction. If you work with different people to create anything in IT, you are probably going to like this book, and are bound to learn something.