The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Palmer gathers the “SWAT” team with Mason, Allers, Davis, McKee, and Brent, and they begin looking at how to deploy 10 times per day, with the goal of releasing Phoenix features for promotions and Marketing. Everyone is dismayed by the goal of 10 deployments per day, and Mason illustrates the huge number of steps and processes from Development to QA to IT Operations. From there, Brent adds steps for IT Operations. Palmer notes the failures in every step in the two Phoenix releases already completed.

McKee compares the deployment diagram to a factory’s value stream map. McKee adds symbols for wait time and processes, concluding that environments and deployment are the main issues. Palmer suggests automating the environment production, allowing Development, QA, and IT Operations to operate in the same environment to avoid problems. Allers, Mason, and Brent agree that they can make this happen, but Palmer pushes further. He asks them to change development to ease deployment, and Mason brings up a step, “code commit,” that he could remove, forcing code to be ready for deployment before submission. Then, he says, code could automatically load into the QA environment, then to IT Operations. This process could eliminate what McKee calls “non-value-add” work, following Reid’s idea that the overall process should only flow forward. Davis suggests involving Pesche, and Palmer marvels at the smooth flow of the team’s efforts.

Within two weeks, the united efforts of Development, QA, and IT Operations are working better than expected. The developers choose to call the team effort Project Unicorn, which operates distinctly from Phoenix to avoid impacting critical systems. By using the same environments and testing automation, the developers are working and moving products to QA and Production faster. They also generate reports comparing customer purchases for Marketing promotions. The Phoenix team begins using Unicorn’s practices after they see how much faster Unicorn completes work.

Davis informs Palmer that Brent has been missing for two days. Brent calls in, explaining to Palmer that Landry and Moulton pulled him to Des Moines to discuss splitting the company. Palmer is furious but explains that Unicorn needs Brent and his assistant will book Brent a flight back. If Unicorn succeeds, the company will not split.

Palmer meets with Masters, who is also furious but assumes the board decided to split the company. Palmer insists that Brent is necessary for Unicorn, which is necessary to meet quarterly goals. Masters says to pull Brent back to Unicorn and send someone else to help plan the split.

The next day, Palmer gets an email from Moulton, copied to Strauss, harshly criticizing Palmer for interfering with Project Talon, the effort to split the company. Masters assures Palmer that he will handle it. In the Unicorn meeting, Mason notes that report times are still much longer than they should be. A developer suggests using virtualization and cloud computing to shorten times. Brent agrees, and Lee volunteers to look into financing. An engineer from Pesche’s team offers to analyze the risk involved, and Palmer reluctantly agrees to try cloud computing.

A week later, the Unicorn meeting is full of good news. The developers report that cloud computing has reduced work times everywhere, and they are successfully delivering reports to Lee’s team. Lee shows how the reports lead to applicable promotions for specific customers, allowing the company to push overstocked products and make higher profit margins. Unicorn’s added features have helped Phoenix to work as it was meant to from the beginning.

Lee shares the massively successful results of the promotional emails she sent. She plans to run a larger campaign on Thanksgiving and warns Palmer to prepare the website for increased traffic. Upset, Moulton publicly denounces Unicorn, and Masters publicly shames her for it. Palmer meets with Pesche, and they marvel at how quickly they can make changes and deployments with Unicorn, including the final audit resolutions. When a problem arises, the Unicorn team fixes it in less than an hour.

Over Thanksgiving, problems are isolated to stocking and ordering, with too many customers ordering and coming to stores for promotional items. The team quickly shuts down recommendations to prevent more customers from flooding the stores, and they plan to arrange different webpages for customers and store workers to use for ordering and stocking.

After a long weekend working, Masters calls Moulton and the team leaders congratulate them on their performance. Because of Unicorn, the quarter will be profitable—a needed turn of events for the company. Moulton complains that their competitors are offering customers custom products, which Parts Unlimited cannot offer. Davis says that adding such a function should be easy with Unicorn.

Davis finds that the system for the new ordering process has been outsourced, and the vendor cannot promise results in less than 18 months. Palmer realizes that this issue moves their constraint outside the company, and he proposes buying out the vendor’s contract and modifying the systems currently in place through Development, QA, IT Operations and IS. Allers notes the risks in trying to modify the existing system but concludes that his team can handle it. McKee suggests limiting contract workers’ involvement and having Pesche’s team handle deleting vendors’ accounts to avoid retribution. Masters approves the plan, though it will cost $1 million. Moulton complains that this is too risky, but Masters chastises her, threatening her job in front of everyone.

Through Unicorn’s successful efforts, Palmer has refined his team to handle any new issues that arise. They institute Project Narwhal, code-named Simian Army Chaos Monkey, in which they intentionally create faults that cause severe outages. The system becomes stronger as they fic the faults, allowing Pesche’s team to institute Project Evil Chaos Monkey, in which the IS team exposes risks. Development keeps up with the changes, and the result is a stronger, more secure system, which Palmer sees as part of the Third Way, creating an environment of continual improvement.

Palmer is the first to arrive at Masters’s house for a celebratory party. Masters offers Palmer a unique opportunity to spend two years in a variety of roles throughout the company. From there, he would become CIO, working toward the COO role as Landry prepares to retire. Masters says he now understands that IT is the life of the business and needs to be integrated into Operations on a broader scale. Palmer is excited by the idea and wants the job, but decides to discuss it with Paige first. Palmer also learns that Moulton is being slowly pushed out of the company.

McKee, Allers, Davis, Mason, Pesche, Landry, and Johnson arrive for the party, including. They congratulate Palmer on the promotion, and Davis presents Palmer with his old laptop, bronzed and affixed to a wooden plaque. As Palmer enjoys the party, Reid approaches him and says he is excited for Palmer but will not be joining the Parts Unlimited board. Instead, he wants to start investing in companies that prioritize IT. Palmer tells Reid that he wants to promote McKee to VP of IT Operations, then to CIO when Palmer becomes COO. Then Davis would take over as VP of IT Operations, though he says he does not want it.

Reid says he wants Palmer to write a book, The DevOps Handbook, outlining the Three Ways Reid taught him. Palmer reluctantly agrees, and he realizes that Unicorn’s success is due to the cooperation between Development, QA, IT Operations, and IS. Everyone at the party, he realizes, is part of DevOps. McKee approaches Palmer, saying she has good and bad news, and Palmer calmly switches into work mode.

The Epilogue sets up the next novel, The Unicorn Project, which begins with Max, the developer responsible for the payroll outage at the beginning of The Phoenix Project.