We talk about this a lot but do not always do a good job of explaining why it is so important. I would argue not understanding this difference and developing this mindset can cause your whole transformation to stall.

So what do we mean when we say project vs product and why is it so critical?

Read below for my thoughts on the topic.

Your organization is changing and undergoing transformation. You’ve rolled out Agile (Scrum and Kanban), you’ve scaled it (SAFe, LeSS, etc.) and even applied DevOps practices (you’re using Kubernetes right? Isn’t that DevOps?) Yet still, millions later, the purported value has yet to materialize.

So how come, after all this work, we still have not realized the value?

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, perhaps we are still stuck in old ways of thinking. Real transformation requires new ways of thinking about the problems and in the case of the examples above, have we really changed? (Kubernetes is an orchestration framework for containers and does not equate to having adopted DevOps).

With millions spent already, what are we missing?

Today I want to talk about a common digital transformation topic I get asked about, application modernization. More specifically, how everyone is doing it but so few successfully. Typically the conversation starts with one of the following:

• “I need to move off my legacy system, how can I use containers to do this?”

• “How do we move to a cloud-native microservice architecture?”

• “We’ve been told to move everything to the cloud, how do we do that with thousands of applications?”

Often, my initial answer is another question: “Out of curiosity, how did you get to this as your solution?”

Strangely, at that point, it often falls off the rails.

I’ll answer these questions in more specifically at the end, today though I want to talk about complexity and the need to experiment.

One of the biggest problems here is that these are all solutions looking for a problem. While we hope they may be appropriate solutions, hope is not a strategy. On their own, there is not enough information to provide guidance an...

Our role at Xodiac in helping organizations with their digital transformations is to create clarity and visibility. Especially as we believe in the importance of creating visibility as the first step in the transformation.

In fact, with seemingly every company undergoing a digital transformation, there are three main requests we are getting from our clients.

1. Having had some initial success, how do I scale?

2. What do I need to continue to grow?

3. How do I know I’m on the right track to achieve my goals?

Below I’ll give an overview of what we’ve seen help with these three concerns and how visibility is so crucial to all of them.

When working with some of our larger customers we frequently run into common barriers to change. Change is difficult and, no matter how often we say it, there is no silver bullet for how to get there. However, we can say there are commonalities in approaches, things we’d look for and actions we’d take in response to those findings. When we look at the delivery of technology within organizations we often come across the barriers within how the teams are organised but even more frequently, how the organization is working with technology is the bigger barrier. Developing powerful roadmaps is valuable and greatly helps with generating alignment and a common vision.

In my last post I spoke to blame culture. In this post I’m going to talk through the second of three common organizational problems we encounter, not looking at the entire system, and how attaining visibility will help you overcome barriers to better achieve your business outcomes.

Our ultimate objective is to help our customers be successful. We have strong opinions on what successful companies look like and what is important for an organizational culture to support sustainable success, but that is a topic for another time. For the technology organizations or departments we work with, our objective loosely translates to

Many organizations put their faith in Agile and DevOps practices to achieve this, but fail to get the results they are hoping for.