The Unicorn Project from IT Revolution, brings together a number of interesting ideas. In the coming weeks, we are setting up a series of meetups to discuss these ideas from the book and how people look to apply them to their own projects.

One of the central themes of the book is around 5 ideals. These are:

1. Locality and Simplicity

2. Focus, Flow and Joy

3. Improvement of Daily Work

4. Psychological Safety

5. Customer First

Ahead of each of the meetups I plan on writing a blog on the topics we plan on discussing. So first up, I’m diving into the first two ideals and how they might be applied. Let’s go!

Our role at Xodiac in helping organizations with their digital transformations is to create clarity and visibility. Especially as we believe in the importance of creating visibility as the first step in the transformation.

In fact, with seemingly every company undergoing a digital transformation, there are three main requests we are getting from our clients.

1. Having had some initial success, how do I scale?

2. What do I need to continue to grow?

3. How do I know I’m on the right track to achieve my goals?

Below I’ll give an overview of what we’ve seen help with these three concerns and how visibility is so crucial to all of them.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, many reflect on what happened in 2019. From new customers to conferences to discoveries, it has been an exciting year.

When working with some of our larger customers, we frequently run into common barriers to change. Change is difficult and, no matter how often we say it, there is no silver bullet for how to get there. However, we can say there are commonalities in approaches, things we’d look for and actions we’d take in response to those findings. When we look at the delivery of technology within organizations, we often come across the barriers within how the teams are working, but even more frequently, how the organization is working with technology is the bigger barrier. Developing powerful roadmaps is valuable and greatly helps with generating alignment and a common vision.

In my last two posts, I spoke to blame culture and looking at the whole system. In this post, I’m going to talk through the third of three common organizational problems we encounter, dealing with silos and specialization.

Last Friday I presented a session on outcome based metrics at the Lean Agile Network meetup in Toronto. Based on the popularity of the session and the questions which we didn’t have the time to address, the topic is clearly on many people’s mind. More to come on metrics in future posts, but for now we’ll focus on what you can learn from the simplest metric of them all: throughput.

In context of our attendance at Collision last month, we published a quick survey to validate some of our assumptions about Socrates. While the survey is still open for everyone to provide us with feedback, this post summarizes the results of the first respondents.