Kevin Behr

Kevin Behr is an IT management practitioner, adviser and author. He founded the Information Technology Process Institute and has held senior technology leadership roles. His work draws on decades spent helping organizations improve the way technology teams operate.

Behr writes about IT service management, DevOps and organizational performance. He is particularly interested in the systems behind daily work: constraints, unplanned tasks, fragile processes and the habits that keep teams trapped in cycles of emergency repair. His books turn these concerns into practical frameworks or workplace narratives.

He co-wrote The Visible Ops Handbook with Gene Kim and George Spafford, offering a staged approach to stabilizing and improving IT operations. The same authors later produced The Phoenix Project, first published in 2013. This business novel follows Bill Palmer at the fictional Parts Unlimited, where an over-budget initiative and recurring outages expose deeper problems in the flow of work. A graphic-novel adaptation followed in 2024.

Begin with The Phoenix Project. Its pressured meetings, production failures and overloaded specialists make abstract ideas about DevOps and the Theory of Constraints concrete. It is also the clearest introduction to Behr’s recurring subject: how leaders can replace firefighting with visible, manageable work.