Book Review?: The Unicorn Project

The Unicorn Project (amazon, audible, supplements: itrevolution) is a new book/follow up of The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim.

And, it’s much more inline with what I was expecting the The Phoenix Project to be. The Phoenix Project focused on The 3 Ways with a strong emphasis on it’s connection to Lean Management. This was done intentionally as the book was supposed to be a retelling of The Goal done with DevOps in mind. In order for The Phoenix Project to tell it’s story it needed to be told from the perspective of someone who was required to see the whole picture of the company, to facilitate understanding of The First Way. To do that, the protagonist is a high level CIO type which has overview of all IT operations in the company. This means that a lot of the day-to-day aspects of a mid-level manager or front-line implementer are glossed over. I would even describe the book as mostly focusing on The First Way (taking more than half the book to explain) and The Second and Third Way also get a bit glossed over. But, in the context of that book, it’s fine. Because “the goal” of that book is to introduce The 3 Ways and give practical examples to help them stick with the reader.

This book continues to build upon the information given in The Phoenix Project, but it presents the information in two modified ways:

• The book is from the point of view of someone who is really a mid-level manager, but the book needs to force her into a front-line implementer position from time to time. This is done to allow for more tangible day-to-day examples to be presented of what can be done.
• The details of the external world are updated to more closely match the current state of DevOps and IT work in 2018/2019. The book references some of the newer capabilities in NoSQL databases, functional programming, and automated testing.

If The Phoenix Project was about describing The 3 Ways. Then this book is about describing The Five Ideals (which are still Lean aligned + some other ideas) :

• The First Ideal – Locality and Simplicity (Remove Mudas/Wastes)
• The Second Ideal – Focus, Flow, and Joy (A lot of things have to work together to get to Joy, Project to Product)
• The Third Ideal – Improvement of Daily Work (Kaizen)
• The Fourth Ideal – Psychologic Safety (Generative Culture, Complex Systems Fail)
• The Fifth Ideal – Customer Focus (Lean Startup, Lean Six Sigma, OKR)

They are all very useful ideals, but the book seemed to fall prey to glossing over details on how to achieve them. As mentioned earlier, there was a similar problem in The Phoenix Project. An example in this book is that our protagonist, Maxine, worked with her team to help define that a Continuous Integration (build) system needs to run Unit Tests in order to verify that each check-in of code doesn’t break the overall functionality. This is introduced as a new concept for their team. The night she introduces the idea, she falls ill and is sick for the next three days. When she returns to work, everyone on the team is writing well designed unit tests and the system has full code coverage. What?! To get a team that has never used unit tests to (a) embrace the value that unit tests provide, (b) take the time to learn a unit testing pattern that isn’t brittle, (c) create meaningful code coverage takes weeks and (d) involves a great deal of mentoring, code review, and will cause frustrations about where your teams time is most valuably spent. But, for this book, it can happen overnight with no negative consequences or trade-offs.

One thing that I really like about this book is that it is trying to take years and years of knowledge and distil it into an easily understandable and entertaining format that might get someone interested in learning more. Hopefully, it encourages anyone that enjoys the book to continue reading. The books publisher, itrevolution.com,  has a number of other books that dive deeper into the subject matter of DevOps and Business Management. By reading or listening to any of their books, you will find a long list of referenced material to continue learning from.