This past year, I read a compelling trio of books that I would recommend for those interested in cultivating a DevOps mindset across an organization.  That mindset can increase transparency and agility, reduce waste, and improve the throughput of technology teams while aligning them further with organizational goals.

The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project is a fictional tale told from perspective of a manager learning IT.  That narrative device enables the supporting characters to take the time to explain some of the challenges of IT via conversations with the main character.   It's a good combination of entertainment and education and it's an easy read regardless of your background.

The book lays out a way to classify types of work and how to make visible the constraints and bottlenecks in value streams so that everyone can focus on doing the right things to increase value delivered while reducing waste.  

It also forever establishes 'Brent' as the name of the "hero" that does who-knows-what in the middle of the night to barely keep the car running, ship afloat, or choose your own metaphor here.  The hidden costs of depending on 'Brents' are illuminated throughout the book.

Highly recommend for all audiences.

The DevOps Handbook

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, details implementation techniques and approaches for introducing more DevOps mentality and practices across an organization.   It's an an on-the-ground implementation manual with guidance around the 3 ways, amplifying feedback loops and how to do security in a scalable way.  

Highly recommended for practitioners.

Accelerate

Accelerate establishes a way to measure software delivery performance, how that performance can directly impact a company's market success, and what practices are being implemented by organizations who do it the best.   It dispels some myths and challenges assumptions.   The best part is that they have data to back up everything, rather than being based on the experience of a select few in a few limited contexts.  I gushed about this book in depth here.

Highly recommended for all audiences.