Team Topologies
Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow: book | training | consulting

Guided Workshops

Team Topologies Guided Workshops

Team Topologies Guided Workshop - Blockers to Fast Flow - P89

 

Workshop outcomes

  1. Understand why fast flow & rapid feedback are essential for modern software delivery

  2. Uncover some current blockers to a fast flow of change within your organization

  3. Visualise the blockers using techniques derived from Value Stream Mapping

  4. Find some candidate separate streams using Independent Service Heuristics

  5. Explore team evolution and identify new roles and capabilities that would support fast flow

“THANK YOU for providing a practical method of implementing fast flow. Brilliant in its simplicity!”
— Filip Van den Bergh, Tribe Lead Cloud & Infrastructure at Telenet

Workshop format

The workshop is run across 3 separate 3-hour sessions, with each session on a different day:

  1. Session 1 - Blockers to flow and feedback

  2. Session 2 - Align to business flow: Independent Service Heuristics

  3. Session 3 - Team evolution for fast flow + wrap-up

We recommend that these sessions are run in the same week: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This helps to keep the material and ideas “front of mind” for attendees whilst giving some space for reflection (and normal work activities). 

Authorized Team Topologies partners deliver the workshops.

Is your organization optimized for fast flow?

Something’s not right! Things seemed to flow when your team was smaller, and you delivered value quickly. Over time, however, your ability to deliver has slowed to a point where it seems to take forever to get any idea from inception into production. Your organization is made up of numerous interconnected teams that are constantly being slowed down by handovers and blocked by dependencies. You’ve heard about or read Team Topologies and found that many ideas for reorganizing your business resonated with you. However, the problem is knowing how and where to get started. This workshop provides a deep dive into an area of your business with Team Topologies experts and helps to uncover blockers to flow, evaluate potential boundaries, and explore ways of evolving from your current state to the desired future state.

Discover what is holding you back

This guided discovery workshop aims to help you and your organization better understand your current state. It will help you uncover existing flow blockers and understand how to start aligning your organization for better flow. Workshop attendees will be guided through discovery sessions to reveal whether your organization is optimized for fast flow and highlights ways you could reorganize to achieve it.

Focusing on your organization and how it delivers on your customer’s needs, we work closely with attendees to investigate how some of your organizational structures may not be aligned with the change pressures within your organization and can result in bottlenecks. We look at different ways in which service and team boundaries may be reorganized to provide better alignment for flow. After identifying existing roles and capabilities, we help you to discover whether they could be adapted and evolved to achieve a faster flow of change.  

Screenshot of the P89 workshop Miro board

Share your discoveries to inspire change

The guided discovery workshops generate the clarity you need to ‘spark the change’ you are looking for in your organization. The workshops provide a clear picture of your current challenges to fast flow and a range of options for the next steps on your journey, articulated in terms of your current (and possible future) organization. 

All the discoveries are captured in a PDF that can be easily distributed with colleagues to facilitate further discussion about how you can begin to affect the change you desire within your organization.

What type of group is the workshop for?

This guided discovery workshop is aimed at groups with more than 50 but less than 500 people within their organizational unit. These numbers are based on Dunbar’s trust boundaries. If you have an organizational unit larger than 500 people, we recommend “zooming in” to a smaller organizational unit, repeating the workshop for each group up to around 500 people. Note: each workshop session has a maximum of 12 attendees.

Who should attend the workshops?

To get the best out of the workshops, we recommend inviting “people who know how the work works”: people with awareness of how changes flow through the organization. This is important because each attendee will play a pivotal role in contributing to the discovery process. Attendees could include:

CIO/CTO (or Office of CTO), Head of Engineering, Head of IT, managers, lead architects, lead software developers, agile coaches, representatives from Community of Practice or Center of Excellence, and so on.

We recommend that you focus on groups that are familiar with (or at least have begun to explore) defining software from the perspective of User Needs: driving conversations about what needs to be done based on what users actually need.

There is a maximum of 15 people attending the workshops to keep discussions fluid.

How should you prepare for the workshop?

To prepare for the workshop, we suggest that everyone:

 
Guided WorkshopTeam TopologiesP89