Phoenix Software Project Management

Question: Describe about the Phoenix Software Project Management? Answer: Introduction: The phoenix project is a novel made on business strategies using IT. It is all about the DevOps, IT. The novel is considered as a modern way to view the goal. This Novel describes those problems, which are faced by every IT organization. It shows the way to practice and culture the experiments to solve the problems, making improvement to the lives of IT employees. This Novel shows a collaborative way to manage the work between the business and IT. The novel tells Bills story. IT manager of parts unlimited was new IT initiative, who code named phoenix project. CEO wanted bill to fix the mass within 90 days to prevent the outsourcing of the entire department. With the help of the of Dr. Reid bill recognize the three possible ways to figure out the whole IT works. Bill came to understand that a manufacturing plant has more in common with IT department. List of recommendation: The recommendation from phoenix project is to figure out these under mentioned facts- How to control the work release into IT operation. The most constrained resources are needed to be used only for the goal oriented task. After figuring out the most constrained resources, there are three way understanding: First way helps to understand the process of making fast flow of work to move from development to IT operation. Second way shows the process to amplify and shorten feedback loop to avoid rework and to fix quality at the resources. Third way describes the creation of culture, in order to take care of making experiments (Pais, 2015). Reason behind mitigated disaster: Some insufficient promises are given to the market. Again the delay with in phoenix launch by 1 week to avoid the failure. Though delaying by one week could cause disappointment of customers. Root causes behind failure: The root cause behind failure lies in the problem in operations. The constant firefighting needed to keep lights on, which causes the payroll system failure. The problems in operation are caused by the lack of process in different important areas: Problem management, incident management and the change management. The reason behind the failure of the change management is caused due to the decision to implement an untested change, which damaged the whole payroll system at a crucial point of time. The failure behind the problem management due to not having a efficient an effective process for the identification of the root cause The incident management process did not have an efficient scheme on business-focused incident prioritization (Patterson, 2000). Need of a war room to manage: The phoenix team members indulge themselves in their project so deeply, that they even need to lock themselves into the war room to avoid distraction. Role of Brent: In the IT project of Phoenix Brent Geller is a Lead Engineer. He worked for the Wes. He was always there in the middle of IT projects. Importance of Brents role in the project/company/story: As far as the importance of Brents role is concerned, he needed to work with the developers to fix the issues at the source. As a lead Engineer he used to tell developers on how things are done in the real world and what those things are, which allows breaking in production (skeptic, 2013). Changes in Brents role to make the project successful: To make the project successful, Brent was pulled off from phoenix job and needed to work on SAN issue. Result of these changes: By the changes in Brents role, Brent Started working on the on SAN issue. After working on the SAN issue, Brent come to a conclusion that, upgrading SAN caused payroll run failure. When Brent was helping one of the SAN engineers to upgrade the firmware, it took a long time and wen nothing accordingly tech note (InfoQ, 2015). Theory of Constrains: Theory of constraints is based on the context of goalachievement, whichis limited by at least one constraint. If there is nothing prevents to achieve goal or higher throughput, then system is made for producing infinite throughput, which is not possible in real life system. In the project phoenix dr. Reid said about the critical mechanism in management of a plant is release of material and job. Without these two factors, no one can control work in progress (WIP) (Kim, Behr and Spafford, n.d.). Role of this theory to manage the phoenix project: This theory guided those engaged people in this project by making them realized about the illusion, which is happened when the improvements are made beside the bottleneck. It made this clear that any improvement, which is made after the bottleneck, has no use because of the damage caused by the starvation. Bills way to the prioritization of projects as parts unlimited: To have control over release of the task into IT operation Bill has figured out the project prioritization into three ways. Firstly, Bill understood how to make out quick work flow, to move from the development to IT operations. The second way describes the process to amplify and shorten the feedback loops to avoid rework and fix quality at source. The third way justifies the learning from failure and understanding the practice and repetition are required as a prior condition to apply for mastery. Most efficient principle about IT management learned from reading this book: In IT management, Virtualization played an important role. With the concept of virtualization, there is no need to manage lots of physical server any more. Due to the virtualization, there are the presence of logical instances inside the server or may be residing in the cloud. In this project Erick used to show the cause behind Brents over usage of time. He was taking week to complete the simple 30 minute changes. The reason was the bottleneck of the tasks. Brent was constantly above utilization of 100%, hence whenever Brent is required for any task, the task keep waiting in a queue. The waiting time is the percentage of busy time (Kim, Behr and Spafford, 2013). Here a graph is shown: on the Y-axis, it is the approximate waiting time and on the X-axis it is showing the % to be busy for a given resource at work font. In the phoenix project, Bill realized the consequences. He realized that their simple 30 minute task needs seven hand offs (e.g. database team, networking and virtualization team). Usefulness of this project beyond MS education: Beyond the MS education, this phoenix project helped on how to recognize the problems which happen in an IT organization. How these IT organization related problems threat every commitment, such as Information security, IT operation and development made in business. How problems are getting fixed using DevOps techniques. DevOps stands for Development and Operation. DevOps is a method to develop software, which stresses collaboration, communication, automation, cooperation measurement and integration between the IT professionals and the software developers. Conclusion: In overall the Phoenix project brought many associated steps of modern IT and management practices together. All the things fundamentally seems clearly about the Theory of constraints, lean, Kanban, Demings system of deep knowledge, even those motivating recommendation by dr. Reid- all are the steps of involving people into work more effectively. This Novel shows a collaborative way to manage the work between the business and IT. This project study shows the root cause behind the failure, such as the problems in operation are caused by the lack of process in different important areas: Problem management, incident management and the change management. Again the cause behind the mitigated disaster is insufficient promises, which are given to the market and the delay in the project launch. As far as recommendations are concerned, after figuring out the most constrained resources, there are three way understanding: First way helps to understand the process of making fast flow of work to move from development to IT operation. Second way shows the process to amplify and shorten feedback loop to avoid rework and to fix quality at the resources. Third way describes the creation of culture, in order to take care of making experiments. References: Anbari, F., Dutton, A., Holt, E., King, L., Wilson, L. and Zacharko, M. (n.d.). Project Phoenix. Kim, G., Behr, K. and Spafford, G. (2013). The phoenix project. Portland, OR: IT Revolution Press. Kim, G., Behr, K. and Spafford, G. (n.d.). The Phoenix project. Pais, M. (2015). Interview Book Review: The Phoenix Project, A Novel About IT, DevOps Helping Your Business Win . infoQueue. [online] Available at: https://www.infoq.com/articles/phoenix-project-book-review [Accessed 2 Mar. 2015]. Patterson, D. (2000). Project Phoenix. San Jose, Calif.: Writers Club Press. skeptic, (2013). Book review: the Phoenix Project. [online] Available at: https://www.itskeptic.org/content/book-review-phoenix-project [Accessed 2 Mar. 2015].