Takeaways from the book "The Unicorn Project"
The Unicorn Project - is a technology novel written by Gene Kim and published in 2019. It talks about a company in the era of digital disruption where it simply cannot cope up with the expectations of stakeholders mainly because it is bound by the old age practices, old software and hardware.
It takes you into a world where existing practices are completely opposite to the practices of Lean management and Agility. It is driven by a bureaucratic management structure, highly political organization, working structure formed by silos such as dev, it, test, ops. The context exposes all the inadequacies of the traditional structure and working principles in the day and age of modern technology and practices. It drives home the points talked about in Agile development and modern DevOps practices.
The main theme where the book revolves around are the 5 Ideals of Modern day technology product development. The 5 Ideals are:
1. Locality and Simplicity: It is about building solutions which are local and having solutions simple and easy to understand. A complex solution is not easy to maintain.
2. Focus, Flow and Joy: It is one of the principles of Agile development. The idea is to focus on a problem, work on the solution, get it tested and deployed. The flow ensures that value is created and realized in a single shot without waiting times. The process of value addition because joyful and a learning experience when there is a quick feedback cycle.
3. Improvement of Daily Work: There should be a focus on feedback loops and improvements in the next cycle. The second ideal leads to the third. The third ideal ensures that mistakes are not repeated, there is a quick learning cycle, and continuously raise the bars of excellence.
4. Psychological Safety: The company should foster an environment where calculated risk taking is encouraged and failures resulting from the risks are tolerated. The learning from the failures should be taken but the focus should not be on the person who took the risks.
5. Customer Focus: The end purpose of developing values should be always kept in mind. What is important is the value provided to the end customer. It is the modern day marketing value.
The book also talks about the competitive strategies of modern organizations. The org should be able to differentiate the "core" and "context" work. The core work is what the customers see as value created by the organization. It is the main competency of the organization. Context is all the important functions that are needed to keep the organization running. By focusing on the core, that is by having the top talents focusing on the core area, the competency of the company is improved. The context is the part where it can be outsourced or even cost-cutting measures can be taken in case of crisis.
Overall a good read. It gives life to the modern day values that are taught such as Marketing, using data analytics, Lean management, software development practices such as microservices (indirectly).
It indirectly emphasizes a point that all companies are technology/software companies in modern day. IT becomes a core function and competency of any company. Also the power of data - "Data is the new oil"!
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