Your organization is changing and undergoing transformation. You’ve rolled out Agile (Scrum and Kanban), you’ve scaled it (SAFe, LeSS, etc.) and even applied DevOps practices (you’re using Kubernetes right? Isn’t that DevOps?) Yet still, millions later, the purported value has yet to materialize.

So how come, after all this work, we still have not realized the value?

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, perhaps we are still stuck in old ways of thinking. Real transformation requires new ways of thinking about the problems and in the case of the examples above, have we really changed? (Kubernetes is an orchestration framework for containers and does not equate to having adopted DevOps).

With millions spent already, what are we missing?

You have an idea, a spark, concept of how your organization could do things better. Now all you need is to work out how. A typical pattern from here is:

1. Realize you need more information or organizational buy-in

2. Engage consultants to show you how

3. Consultants leave

4. You implement and realize all your goals!

Except step 4 so often doesn’t happen. You have the report, you’ve confirmed what you thought and have a solid plan, but at execution, everything goes wrong.

So what can you do to help your idea succeed once the consultants are gone?

Today I want to talk about a common digital transformation topic I get asked about, application modernization. More specifically, how everyone is doing it but so few successfully. Typically the conversation starts with one of the following:

• “I need to move off my legacy system, how can I use containers to do this?”

• “How do we move to a cloud-native microservice architecture?”

• “We’ve been told to move everything to the cloud, how do we do that with thousands of applications?”

Often, my initial answer is another question: “Out of curiosity, how did you get to this as your solution?”

Strangely, at that point, it often falls off the rails.

I’ll answer these questions in more specifically at the end, today though I want to talk about complexity and the need to experiment.

One of the biggest problems here is that these are all solutions looking for a problem. While we hope they may be appropriate solutions, hope is not a strategy. On their own, there is not enough information to provide guidance an...

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.

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.