The Phoenix Project, is a novel based on a fictional IT department in a fictional company written by Gene Kim, who is a self confessed DevOps enthusiast as well as being the author of the DevOps Handbook and The Unicorn Project. Gene Kim additionally organises the DevOps Enterprise Summit and potentially one of the most recognisable names in the DevOps community. Having co-founded Tripwire as their CTO, Gene has arguably some of the best credentials to talk about DevOps, and IT transformation.

Within the Phoenix Project, four types of work are identified within the book:

Business Projects

These are the types of projects the “business” departments call upon IT to deliver, and are usually aligned to the corporate strategy to the organisation.

Internal IT Projects

These projects tend to be the projects IT personnel get the most reward from being involved with - They represent network / server upgrades, automation, internal IT process improvement etc. Because these projects are undertaken by IT teams, they usually do not involve PMO oversight, and more often than not they go untracked, placing greater strain on operations.

Changes

These can be considered a result of the above two types of work, and relate to the processes around implementing updates / fixes to production IT environments

Unplanned Work

The major disrupter to work-flow - unplanned changes. These are typically represented by incidents and problems which have the effect of making it much more difficult to deliver planned work / changes.