The Phoenix Project
In my circles, you always hear about The Phoenix Project as one of those messianic books, the bible of project managers everywhere, or some such hyperbole. Well, this is the year I finally deigned to put myself through the rigmarole of reading it.
So, we’ll get the good out of the way first. This is a disaster porn book. You can read this book much like you read The Martian, or watch The Titanic or The Hindenberg. Its a page turner pretty much the way those other books are. Humans love a good disaster, its the reason we rubberneck on accidents, pretend to not listen (but really listening intently) when we hear a public argument, and love all sorts of scandals.
So this is a reasonably well written disaster porn book. Its about a business which makes auto parts, and they have this IT project that’s supposed to help the company sell more parts by making inventory, both ordering and selling of it easier, as well as let marketing and sales do promos easier.
It fails spectacularly of course, and our hero is tapped to save it by becoming the director of IT. Along the way, this mysterious guru comes in and helps him in cryptic mr. miyage type ways by teaching him the mystic arts of agile project management.
If that sounds as unlikely to you as it does to me, then we’re on the same page.
At the end of it all, yes, TPM saves the day. Knowing how to create and use a kanban board, knowing how to identify your bottlenecks, and protect your scarce resources..and I feel like puking. =) But I”ll power forward. Yes, if you do your TPM the “right” way, you too, can save your business, as long as that was the only thing that was truly preventing your business from crushing its competitors. I mean, never mind having a good product, or having the right engineers that can solve your problems, or having a good leadership team….or..basically I’ve never been in a company where the failure was “we needed a good project manager who can run agile the right way”.
The entire book reeks of that. its as if all they needed was just the right point of view and magically all their problems are solved. Its like one of those “one easy tip and you’ll change your life” ads you see on the internet. Its never easy, its never free, and its never as simple as they sell it.
Anyway, I can’t really recommend this book unless business disaster porn is your ideal bathroom reading, and even then, I can pobably recommend other stuff like the bernie maddof book (https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Lies-Be…).
Its still 3 * becuase its a well written disaster porn book. Just.. please don’t read too much into how TPm can save your biz. coz it can’t. =) ](2024-03-07-the-eden-test-book.md)