On this page: We have curated the best tools to help you on your journey. The page has several sections covering various tools and practices to help you with different areas.
Readiness | Cognitive Load | Adoption | Visualization
Readiness Assessment
Assess how ready your organization is for fast flow.
The assessment covers the 10 key dimensions of organizational agility. These act as prerequisites for the adoption of Team Topologies and other principles that enable fast flow. They show where your organization is in terms of being flow-oriented or hindered by organizational processes.
Why complete the assessment?
You’ll get recommendations for the next steps in your journey towards fast flow.
We’ll email you a full report that outlines your organization’s preparedness for the optimal operating model and capabilities to achieve fast flow. It includes a visual representation of where your organization is on the 10 measures.
Adoptiion Tools & Practices
Independent Service Heuristics
When designing organisations for a fast flow of change, we need to find effective boundaries between different streams of change in order to ensure that we create good team boundaries. This can be achieved by identifying potential boundaries across services, domains, applications or streams. This article looks at how you can do this using a technique called Independent Service Heuristics (ISH).
The Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) are rules-of-thumb (clues) for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product.
Team Interaction Modelling
Getting started with modelling your team-of-teams organization?
This article introduces the mechanics of modelling and continuously evolving the design of your organization based on understanding of the cognitive load of teams.
User Needs Mapping for team and service boundaries
In many organizations, team and service boundaries were historically defined by things like technology, process, or architecture tier (for N-tier systems). However, in the context of a fast flow of change for user-centric systems, it can be valuable to let user needs shape and influence team and service boundaries. This is where User Needs Mapping can help.
User Needs Mapping is a term coined by Rich Allen, a TTVP, during the preparation of some of the Team Topologies official Guided Workshops, and is based on one of the early stages of the Wardley Mapping process.
Remote First Team Interaction
Remote-first work is the "new normal" for companies around the world. There is no shortage of advice on how individual teams can bond and work effectively remotely.
However, there is not much on how to address remote interactions between different teams that need to collaborate remotely, as part of the same value stream. Moving from the physical to the online world can further expose pre-existing interaction problems, increase wait times and slow down delivery and possibly response to incidents.
Team APIs Template
A template for defining a Team API. Based on some of the ideas in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton @matthewskelton and Manuel Pais @manupaisable.
Thinest Viable Platform
The interesting thing about platform is - it's maybe not the platform's of the past, because platforms of the past often in many organizations were great big great massive things, very difficult to use - black boxes and teams had to use them - it's mandatory to use these things and it was awful to use in many cases, not everywhere but often these platforms are just awful.
The platforms we're talking about have placed a strong focus on developer experience, they see other development teams as their customers effectively. They run the platform as a product or service really thinking about what's their experience in using them.
Cognitive Load Tools
Cognitive load is a central theme for the adoption and evolution of Team Topologies. It is equally important for both business and technology teams.
Unfortunately, measuring cognitive load is still a rather challenging area and there is lack of tools to help leaders understand better the current cognitive load of their teams as well as the evolution of it.
We have used a number of research studies in the area and work with data scientists to be able to provide you with a tool which delivers insights for your most important decisions around team-of-teams organizational design.
Teamperature is currently in restricted beta and you can join the waiting list.
Templates & Shapes
Free print Team Modelling shapes
Designed by the authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais and battle-tested in training sessions around the world, these printed shapes are officially the fastest way to model and visualise different options for team responsibilities and interactions based on the ideas in the Team Topologies book.
Free diagramming templates
We have templates of the shapes for most of the popular diagraming and visualization tools, e.g. Miro, Figma, Lucidchart, PowerPoint, Google Slides and more. We keep them all on GitHub. If your tool of choice is missing in the templates, we would love to feature your template. Get in touch.
Buy pre-cut Team Modelling shapes
We have partnered with Agile Stationery to offer people, who love or prefer the tactile interactive workshop experience, reusable shapes.
How to use the print shapes
Watch Matthew Skelton explain the intended use of the printed shapes with an example.
Background info
The original DevOps Team Topologies patterns
In 2013, Matthew Skelton published the original DevOps team topologies patterns, which have become the industry standard for discussing the merits and drawbacks of different team designs for software delivery. Since 2015, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais have been curating the DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstoplogies.com
The DevOps team topologies patterns compare and contrast effective and ineffective patterns for organizing teams for modern software delivery. These patterns are point-in-time snapshots of team relationships.
The DevOps Topologies collection of patterns (diagrams and descriptions) by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Use these shapes to model organisation design and team interactions within your organisation based on the ideas in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. Designed by the authors and battle-tested in training sessions around the world, these shapes help to visualise and explore different options for team responsibilities and interactions for organisations building modern software systems.
The shapes are indicated in the PDF with dotted lines. Simply print the PDF then cut along the dotted lines to use the shapes.
NOTE: you can also buy pre-cut shapes from our partner Agile Stationery - worldwide shipping.