The Unicorn Project – I am on IT

Let me introduce you to Maxine Chambers. Maxine is a highly skilled Lead Developer and Architect. She works at Parts Unlimited.

You might have heard of Parts Unlimited, if you have read/listened to The Phoenix Project previously. If you have not, no problem. The Unicorn Project can be read without any knowledge of The Phoenix Project.

At the start of The Unicorn Project, Maxine who just came back from vacation, has been chosen as the scapegoat for a major outage with payroll. She is being placed in a temporary exile with the Phoenix project.

Being a skilled developer, Maxine’s first impulse is to get a Phoenix build up and running on her laptop. What seems to be an easy and quick task gets ouf of hand because of obstacles over obstacles – simply put: bureaucracy.

Fighting bureaucracy using her skills and knowledge, she meets Kurt Reznick. Kurt is one of the QA managers who appreciates someone thinking out of the box. Kurt helps Maxine and invites her to a group of Parts Unlimited employees who are like Maxine and Kurt who call themselves the rebellion.

The rebellion takes on the challenges coming their way. They start of small but succeed in full. They succeed because of the five ideals. Which are:

Locality and Simplicity
Focus, Flow, and Joy
Improvement of Daily Work
Psychological Safety
Customer Focus

All five ideals in place, make work easier and keep the flow alive.

The book is written by Gene Kim. The audiobook is read by target=”_blank”>Frankie Corzo.

When I saw on Twitter in December 2019 that Gene Kim had published a new book, again taking place at Parts Unlimited, I did not have to think about it, if I would want to read/listen to it.

Working in the IT industry, The Unicorn Project is a very good read. Just like The Phoenix Project, this book gives insight and understanding of how much DevOps is involved in every decision made in a company.

Without DevOps nothing really is able to function well. You cannot view DevOps isolated from other processes. If you do, it’s easy to blame IT if something goes badly wrong – even though IT is not even to blame.

If you are an IT person and you like a good read/easy listen, I can clearly recommend The Unicorn Project. You will enjoy your time spend at Parts Unlimited.

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