Keys to The Phoenix Project

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The challenges presented in this book are quite common if you look at what most software developers and IT professionals deal with today. Since the three co-authors of The Phoenix Project are prominent thought leaders in the IT industry, they are able to point out effective strategies to deal with these challenges, helping your company win in the long run.
Let's analyze five of the most impactful lessons from this book.

1. Identify the four types of work (TI)
Erik explains that it is easier to plan and monitor work in IT when it is classified into four divisions:

Enterprise Projects : This type of work includes new project initiatives and processes that occupy a large part of your company's functions. They are individually overseen by the Project Management Office within a program governance framework.
Internal Projects : These include periodic tasks, such as system maintenance, upgrades, and security patches, that keep companies like Parts Unlimited running.
Changes : These are routine tasks, very similar to those of internal projects, but include small-scale modifications such as bug fixes and version updates. Typically, a ticketing system needs to be set up to track issues, changes, and resolution .
Unplanned Work : While the other categories of work are agreed upon in advance, this one is not. It can quality directors email lists be anything from recovery tasks after a system failure to extra work because a team member didn't communicate problems in a timely manner. This causes scheduling conflicts and process inefficiencies that escalate into larger problems. To avoid unplanned work, Bill and his team agree to review team capacity before approving work on change requests.
This multi-level work tracking system ensures that there is a proper flow of responsibility that the team can rely on.

2. Limit work in progress (WIP)
According to the book, you should have as few tasks in progress as possible at once.

Bill believes that when your attention is divided between multiple tasks, you become overwhelmed and prone to making mistakes due to the dispersion of attention. The more mistakes you make, the more effort and company resources you will invest in solving them. Since the original work was not fruitful, it will be seen as a waste of resources that could have been spent on new tasks.

The book recommends aligning strategies with agile or Lean methodologies to ensure that planned tasks optimize resources.

Bonus Reading: Expand your knowledge with our guides to:

Agile project management
Lean project management