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.

Last year I was invited to help the Queen’s Hyperloop Design Team improve their chances in the SpaceX competition. They had just been informed that they did not make it into the last round of the competition, so we focused on setting up the team for success going forward.

Many teams claim to follow agile and lean practices, yet are still challenged to deliver valuable software on a regular basis. Often, agile practices increase the transparency and visibility of the delivery process and, in turn, the intrinsic quality of the produced results. This creates the perception of an agile delivery model from within the system but rarely is the outside perception aligned with that view.