George Spafford

George Spafford is a vice president analyst at Gartner, where his work covers DevOps and DevSecOps, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, and IT infrastructure and operations strategy. Before joining Gartner, he worked in consulting on ITIL, information security, IT strategy and service improvement. He holds an MBA from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor’s degree in materials and logistics management from Michigan State University.

His books apply systems thinking and operational discipline to the problems technology teams face: unstable services, overloaded workflows, risky changes and poor coordination between IT and the wider business. His earlier collaborations include The Visible Ops Handbook and Visible Ops Security, both practical guides to making IT operations more controlled and measurable.

Spafford is best known to general readers as a co-author, with Gene Kim and Kevin Behr, of The Phoenix Project. First published in 2013, the novel follows Bill Palmer, an IT manager given ninety days to rescue a late, over-budget initiative at the fictional Parts Unlimited. Its factory analogy and “Three Ways” framework turn ideas about flow, feedback and continual learning into a workplace story.

Start with The Phoenix Project. It is the clearest introduction to Spafford’s recurring concerns because it shows operational failures unfolding through recognizable meetings, outages, queues and organizational conflicts rather than presenting them only as abstract management principles.