Whenever the weather allows for it, we like to eat outside. At dinner time in our little courtyard in the city of Toronto, mother nature treated us to a beautiful scene. A few days later it turned into an invaluable lesson...

Two doves and a chick

A mourning dove landed on the fence, looking us straight in the eye. "What a wonderful sight," I thought, "I bet it's eyeing something on our plate." Without breaking the line of sight, the dove flew over to the side of the deck, even closer, testing the boundaries of its comfort zone.

"Roocoo! Roocoo!" A few minutes later mommy dove arrives, a little chick trailing inches behind her. The family reunited, they waggled to an open space a bit further away, while we watched the scene unfold at a safe distance. By now we realized that daddy had scouted the environment, checking our reactions to his proximity. He must have considered us safe, the little one would not be harmed.

To our surprise, the adults took off, leaving the little one alone. Stunne...

Ever since John Allspaw’s “10+ Deploys a Day” and Patrick Debois coining of the term “DevOps” in 2008, DevOps has been transforming businesses in terms of software development and deployment. The DevOps culture has enabled teams from the software development and IT operations to collaborate and develop more reliable products, as well as respond to customer needs, to achieve business goals.

The increasing number of businesses utilizing DevOps platforms to enhance business operations has fuelled demand for advanced IT transformations. In fact, according to PR Newswire, the global DevOps market is projected to be valued at over $23 billion by 2027, with the U.S and Canada as major contributors. 

Where is DevOps heading?

The last decade has seen a lot of companies accelerating their digital transformations to improve software delivery. To keep up with the demands of a rapidly evolving business and technology landscape post-pandemic, the DevOps community continues to improve its practices to i...

Creating more value for customers is a core business strategy. With more technologies being developed, companies have been optimizing their software delivery to get the best value out of their products or services. Instead of focusing on individual functions, companies are now developing an interest in the end-to-end value chain. Software development is no longer just the business of IT departments. Company leaders and management are taking an active role in making sure that the software delivery process is driving value to the business. In a way, every organization has become a software company. 

Unfortunately, even after investing considerable time and resources on IT transformations, companies still experience misalignment in business vision, strategies, and goals. While they may have implemented new ways of working, such as Agile and DevOps, there is often a disconnect bet...

In previous posts, we discussed what you can learn about your team from tracking a minimum of data. We introduced throughput as the most meaningful metric you can get from only the completion time of a work item. In a subsequent post, we explained how you can calculate cycle time and work in progress by tracking the start time of a work item. In this post, we focus solely on how to calculate failure demand and what it tells you about the true delivery capacity of your team.

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 oth...

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was onto something when he said many years ago that

A saying as true today as it was for Heraclitus in Ancient Greece.

Today, businesses are impacted by change. Competitors introduce new capabilities or services, customers' loyalty shifts from brands towards value propositions, and new and exciting players disrupt the market altogether.