Enabling faster adoption of Team Topologies patterns and practices

The Team Topologies Accelerator is a 12-week programme guided by Team Topologies experts to help speed the adoption of Team Topologies patterns and practices.

Programme Outcomes

Accelerate Team Topologies adoption by using experts as a force multiplier
Explore users and their needs to uncover insights with User Needs Mapping
Identify candidate separate streams using Independent Service Heuristics
Capture current and future team structures with Team Interaction Modelling
Evaluate team cognitive load and the impact it may have on team dynamics
Develop Team APIs and define Thinnest Viable Platforms
Discover how architecture evolution may affect team dynamics

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Accelerate the Adoption of Team Topologies

Team Topologies brings new and compelling ways of thinking about how to organize your business for fast flow. The Fundamental Team Types and Team Interaction Modes provide a new vocabulary for describing succinctly how your teams interact now and in the future. The team-first approach of considering Dunbar’s number, Conway’s Law and team cognitive load when deciding how to organize your business brings new insights that help to uncover different ways in which you can organize your teams in order to generate a faster flow of change.

All this is great but it can seem a little overwhelming. Maybe you are thinking “Where would I even start?”, “Is this team interaction model correct?”, “Should this team be a stream-aligned team or a platform team?”, “What does an enabling team actually do?”. That is why we have created this 12-week accelerator programme, to help boost your Team Topologies adoption.

Team Topologies Valued Practitioners (TTVPs) have hands-on experience in helping organizations to adopt Team Topologies patterns and practices. By introducing TTVPs as an Enabling Team and working with your internal team members using the Facilitation Interaction Mode over a predefined period, TTVPs act as a force multiplier and help to accelerate the benefits of aligning your organization for fast flow.

What is the programme timeline?

The programme runs over a 12-week period and consists of one 2-hour session every week for 12 weeks plus one 90-minute sense-check session per month from one of the authors of Team Topologies (Matthew Skelton or Manuel Pais), providing direct access to author insights and experience.

What is the session format?

Each weekly session is conducted using Miro, an online collaboration tool, and comprises a brief check-in and Q & A session where attendees can discuss current blockers and raise any questions that need to be addressed in the session. Based upon the current needs of the attendees, the core focus of each session will be agreed upon and may include:

User Needs Mapping
Independent Service Heuristics
Team Interaction Modelling
Team API development
Cognitive load assessment
Moving towards ‘Platform as a Product’
General Q & A

At the end of the session, we will wrap up and propose actions to be taken before the next session.

Screenshots of the Miro board

Full 12-week view of the Miro board for the P812 Accelerator

Zoomed-in section of the Miro board for the P812 Accelerator

What are the programme deliverables?

It is expected that over the course of the programme, your organization design will evolve towards a desired future state. Any notes, diagrams, maps and/or models generated during the sessions will be captured on the Miro board for future reference and if required this can be exported in a PDF format.

Who should attend the sessions?

We recommend forming an “Organization Enablement Team” consisting of 4-5 core people within your organization that will have the drive and autonomy to be able to make key strategic decisions about how the organization is structured. The core team may 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 keeping the initial team size to 4 or 5 so that the sessions are focused and productive, however, over the course of the 12 weeks there may be times where other team members are invited into the sessions to present and discuss possible team changes in order to gain feedback on any decisions being made.