The Unicorn Project

The Phoenix Project was published in 2013 and has been a hit in the IT community since. I mentioned it in my blog 10x Engineers last year but don’t just take it from me, Stephen Northcutt, the president of the SANS Technology Institute also has high praise for the book:

"This is the most amazing IT book I have ever read. Though it follows a fictitious company, the events are so real life that anyone in industry is going to relate to the story. Buy this book, read this book and then hand it to a senior manager in your organization."

Queue the sequel: The Unicorn Project was published last year. The story is set during the same time period as the Phoenix Project but this time it’s from a software developer’s perspective. Maxine is scapegoated for an outage she could not have caused; an example of a 4th ideal violation (more on this later). Her punishment is reassignment to the Phoenix Project but her work ethic enables her to spearhead vast improvements through rebellion and direct subversion of ITIL processes.

Yes this is a DevOps evangelism book and carries the bias that DevOps solves all IT problems, however this book differs than the Phoenix Project in it’s teaching goal. The 5 ideals have almost nothing to do with IT and could be applied to almost any employer:

  1. The First Ideal is Locality and Simplicity

    • The first ideal is all about simplification and daily improvements to your own work process. Better use of scripts to automatically solve problems is a great example.

  2. The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy

    • The second ideal strives to build a culture where pain is not part of solving problem. In the book they solve a problem but then have to wait for approval to implement it and that can take weeks.

  3. The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work

    • The third ideal focuses on immediately finding and solving technical debt. Entropy is a universal rule so little problems will continue to grow until solved.

  4. The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety

    • The fourth ideal protects people proposing new ideas and trying new things. Psychological safety for all workers regardless of industry is very important.

  5. The Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus

    • The fifth ideal ensures decisions are ultimately made to help technology users. Everyone has a customer; you should be solving their problems.

As you can see they are not IT specific but rather an excellent set of system to better working in general. The Unicorn Project excellently supplements the Phoenix Project and I highly recommend it!

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