We are excited to announce the launch of our newly updated Xodiac website. We have completely changed the layout to clarify the outcomes we help organizations achieve. As before, you will also find useful links to events we are speaking at, podcasts, and blog posts.
Our clients have been asking for a simple way to understand our services and the benefits we bring. To help with this, we have focused on our two most popular services:
- Flow Engineering – Created in collaboration with our partner at Visible Consulting, this value stream-focused framework targets the creation of clarity and alignment across your organization through 4 maps: Outcome Map, Value Stream Map, Dependency Map, and Capability Map.
- Powerful Roadmaps – Based on the book by our own Gino Marckx, this service helps organizations develop a product roadmap that leverages risk to respond to changes and unexpected obstacles in the marketplace.
Below I’ll discuss the benefits of these two methods and how they relate to each other in more detail.
Flow Engineering
Flow Engineering creates clarity and alignment around how your organization works together to deliver value to customers.
Examples of where we’ve used this framework to help customers are:
- Understanding where to focus funding
- Aligning teams in a cloud migration program
- Initiating the adoption of agile practices within development
- Building a roadmap for how to adopt continuous assurance
- Helping organizations determine how to scale
Being lightweight, flexible, and customer-driven allows us to apply Flow Engineering to all these use cases and more.
The practice itself uses a series of generative exercises. We call these mapping exercises as they visualize your delivery process and target outcomes. It makes them easy to comprehend, just like a map.
The core value of Flow Engineering is in the delivery of 4 maps:
- Outcome: Define and clarify outcomes
- Value Stream: Identify and address flow constraints
- Dependency: Visualize and address external needs
- Capability: Measure and address internal needs
However, the complete end-to-end framework consists of 9 steps, each described in more detail on our services page.
Powerful Roadmaps
Powerful Roadmaps focuses on identifying what value to deliver at what time. Although initially designed to guide product road mapping, the practice also applies to other types of roadmaps.
Examples of where we’ve used this framework to help customers are:
- Moving from feature creation plans to craft strategic product roadmaps
- Balancing feature creation vs engineering needs
- Building an understanding of risk and leveraging it to make decisions
- Creating alignment to outcomes to guide decision-making
- Transforming an organization to use modern delivery practices
The roadmaps we collaboratively create with you are not linear. True product roadmaps that work in an agile product development environment need to present options to be able to leverage learning along the way. We like to say that a good roadmap is dynamic and provides opportunities to change directions. The objective is to deliver the highest value most effectively. Think of our service like the maps application on your phone. Through our knowledge and experience, you can learn of obstacles up ahead and decide to take a different path. We may also recommend additional routes and stops along the way, creating opportunities to add value while meeting the primary objective.
More details about the steps involved can be found on our services page.
Conclusion
Stay tuned and check back in as we continue to expand the content to bring more value.
If you see a need for these services or would like to discuss the issues you are encountering with your IT strategy, just reach out to us here.