[richman777]

A lot of this was covered in "The Phoenix Project". A good read but a bit idealistic in the expected outcome. The fake company was essentially able to right the sinking ship after the band had already stopped playing, in 2 quarters no less.

However, the core tenets were valid from a general approach. My fear when reading was the potential to go overboard. We have all met over-zealous scrum masters. Same could be applied to a lot of the stuff they were essentially transferring from manufacturing to development and more specifically devops.

[Jtsummers]

It's worth reading The Goal as The Phoenix Project is somewhat based on it. The Goal introduces the idea of Theory of Constraints in a similar novelized form, and The Phoenix Project takes ToC and applies it to information systems/software work. There's overlap between ToC and the Toyota Way (Toyota Production System, Lean, etc.) as all are based on taking a systems view of things, and place a great deal of emphasis on identifying problems with the process, not the people (that is, no individual blame).

[mbubb]

I had a CTO loan me "The Goal" after I came back from USENIX in Boston (2011) talking about devops and shite... Its a good read and gave context to the Phoenix project without being a spoiler...

[kesor]

There are also a bunch of very nice books about TLS, which stands for "Theory of Constraints + Lean + Six Sigma".

For example books by Bob Sproull and books by Bruce Nelson.

[tvanantwerp]

I really enjoyed The Phoenix Project. I agree that things come together a bit too nicely at the end--seemed unrealistic. The first half though, when everything is going wrong, seemed very realistic. I couldn't read it before bed, or else I'd get too worked up to sleep.

[richman777]

It made a rough transition for me because all of the things going wrong were all too familiar.

Then when it wrapped up very nicely I felt like I was bad at my job. "Wait, how did they fix it so fast!?!" (hyperbole here but it was sort of a gut punch)

[kesor]

I read The Phoenix Project several times, but compared with The Goal it has very little to teach you. It is a nice story, easy to relate, but extremely hard to understand what is it that needs to be done at an organization to move it through this kind of change. IMHO it is much easier to follow and learn a process of improvement in Goldratt's books.

Actually, the full title of "The Goal" is "The Goal: A Process of ongoing Improvement". Goldratt used to call it POOGI.