The Phoenix Project | Book Review

I’ve long believed that to effectively manage IT
is not only a critical competency, but a significant
predictor of company performance (p. 335).

By Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a natural companion to Jill Dyché’s The New IT. Recall Dyché introduces a spectrum of six IT Archetypes: Tactical, Order Taking, Aligning, Data Provisioning, Brokering, and IT Everywhere. Additionally, The New IT’s three-part focus on IT Issues, Transformation and Leadership, respectively, correspond well to The Phoenix Project.

The Phoenix Project is primarily an engaging, realistic story of transformation at Parts Unlimited, and like The New IT, contains valuable leadership lessons. This review captures transformative leadership moments corresponding to our leadership experiences as the Phoenix Project matures from a Tactical to IT Everywhere archetype.

Tactical | Getting Started

After spending millions launching Phoenix (think modernization initiative) Parts Unlimited remains stuck in a tactical, reactive mode, unable to competently take orders much less provision data. “We need to increase our market share and average order sizes. Customers need to be able to buy from us wherever they want, whether it’s on the Internet or in our retail stores.” (p. 21) Bill Palmer, the new VP of IT Operations has an initial insight into his leadership philosophy – expectations clarity by asking Steve the CEO: What do you want most from me? And what don’t you want? (p. 22)

Steve launches a difficult and lengthy series of observations, repeatedly receiving feedback comprised of personal interpretation, rumors, labels, unsolicited advice and threats:

• [Patty] has a reputation for loving processes more than people (p. 31).
• He was installing some security application that John needed to get up and running this week (p. 38).
• For years, I’ve been trying to get people to use our change management process and tools. But just like John, no one uses it (p. 44).
• Brent, Brent, Brent, Brent! Can’t we do anything without him? (p. 69).
• Interrupts. People in the business constantly ask our staff to do things for them. Especially marketing (p. 77).

Bill spends a great deal of energy sorting data or facts from evaluation, a best practice we learn in our Feedback workshop. A huge Knowing-Doing Gap emerges since there is apparently little or no knowledge-sharing, training or development.

Bill’s mentor, Erik, challenges Bill’s thinking beyond IT Issues toward Transformation and Leadership. A breakthrough occurs when Patty realizes “I suppose I care more about our survival that whether we use our old process or not.” (p. 82) Erik asks Bill about the nature of work. “But you have a much bigger problem, and it has nothing to do with your argle-bargle of ‘efficiencies’ and ‘process.’ Your problem right now is that you obviously don’t actually know what ‘work’ is.” (p. 87) Erik offers a terrific analog. If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong (p. 91).

Bill realizes his organization is terribly misaligned and employs one of the most effective Conflict Leadership Strategies. “My goal is to observe and seek to understand.” (p. 112) The first breakthroughs emerge. We’ve gotten more change, incident, and escalation processes going in the last week that we have in the last five years (p. 118). Bill has another revelation. Unplanned work – [is] the most destructive type of work (p. 159). Just like our Urgent and Not Important category explored during Setting Leadership Priorities workshops.

Beginning to Lead

Faced with the realization Steve’s expectations were not SMART Goals, and receiving no appreciation for his initial breakthroughs, Bill quits. Or put another way, Bill demonstrates his leadership philosophy non-negotiables. Steve realizes his error allowing Bill’s return. Steve reflects upon prior success: “What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another.” (p. 184)

The group begins aligning. He [Erik] asked on what basis do we decide whether we can accept a new project? (p. 195) The team learns to say no. “When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning.” (p. 196) New realizations, Aligning and Data Provisioning, occur. “Remember Jimmy, the goal is to increase the throughput of the entire system, not just the number of tasks being done.” (p. 199) Erik challenges John’s single focus compliance mindset. “You never see the end-to-end business process, so I guarantee you that many of the controls you want to put in aren’t even necessary.” (p. 201)

A powerful metric emerges: The wait time for a given resource is the percentage that the resource is busy, divided by the percentage that the resource is idle (p. 213). Perhaps this is why so many bosses don’t have time for their subordinates. New success definitions form. You win when you protect the organization without putting meaningless work into the IT system. And you win when even more when you can take our meaningless work out of the IT system (p. 221). Another breakthrough toward IT Everywhere: Creating and prioritizing work inside a department is hard. Managing work among departments must be at least ten times more difficult (p. 236). Proactive rather than Reactive Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are now sought. Our goal is not just to improve business performance but to get earlier indicators of whether we’re going to achieve them or not, so we can take appropriate action (p. 268).

IT Everywhere

As Bill’s point of view expands company-wide, and he now sees IT very much like Parts Unlimited manufacturing plants, he essentially reshapes his next job position, without realizing what he has done. “I needed to span the departmental boundaries of Development and IT Operations.” (p. 301)

• I can work together to build a deployment run book, to capture all the lessons learned from our mistakes (p. 304).
• All the developers were using exactly the same operating system, library versions, database settings, and so forth (p. 308).
• People are staying up all night because everything was going right (p. 317).
• I want to commend you for truly working together and being worthy of one another’s trust (p. 323).

You’ve helped me see that IT is not merely a department. Instead, it’s pervasive, like electricity (p. 331).

Summary

We may all learn from Bill’s story, especially if we believe that because of our expertise, lack of direct reports, or position we are therefore not leaders.

We need to create a culture that reinforces the value
of taking risks and learning from failure and the need
for repetition and practice to create mastery (p. 329).