The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data (2019) is The Phoenix Project with the following substitutions applied:
sed -e 's/Bill Palmer/Maxine Chambers/g' \
-e 's/VP of IT Operations/senior developer/g' \
-e 's/operations perspective/developer perspective/g' \
-e 's/The Three Ways/The Five Ideals/g' \
-e 's/Erik the board member/a rebellion called the Rebellion/g' \
-e 's/constraint theory/developer experience/g' \
the_phoenix_project.txt > the_unicorn_project.txt
Which makes this, by transitivity, a second-order regex of The Goal:
cat the_goal.txt | sed -f phoenix.sed | sed -f unicorn.sed > the_unicorn_project.txt
The Unicorn Project retells the same timeline as The Phoenix Project but from a developer’s perspective instead of an operations manager’s. It is the same factory, seen from the floor instead of the office. The constraint is still the constraint. The insight is still the insight. The marriage subplot is mercifully absent, replaced by a developer’s struggle to get a build environment running — which is, for the target audience, considerably more emotionally engaging.
The Five Ideals (Locality and Simplicity, Focus/Flow/Joy, Improvement of Daily Work, Psychological Safety, Customer Focus) are the Three Ways wearing a different hat. The Rebellion is Jonah distributed across a group. Maxine is Alex/Bill with a compiler.
The book is fine. The book is also the third time the same story has been told, and the constraint on the genre is now the genre itself.
Read The Goal.
