Truls Jørgensen - Team Topologies Advocate
Truls Jørgensen - Team Topologies Advocate
With a background as a developer, Truls, as a principal engineer, strives to balance his time between writing software in teams and building a team-first, product-oriented organization. He believes that creating a sustainable, adaptable organization is essential for teams to develop services that can evolve over time. As the first official in-house developer at NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration) in 2016, Truls has played a central role in transforming and modernizing digitalization efforts. He has articulated principles to guide teams towards alignment while maintaining a well-defined circle of autonomy:
You can't buy ownership. Insourcing is imperative for modernizing legacy systems. Complex problems are cross-functional problems best solved in cross-functional teams.
Alignment with autonomous teams can be achieved through techniques that stimulate discussion and transparency while providing clear direction and guidance.
Descriptive techniques, such as an internal technology radar and weekly town hall meetings, stimulate discussion and aid learning between teams, fostering alignment.
Normative techniques, including a strategically opinionated, carefully communicated technical direction aligned on values, and platforms that operationalize good practices, work well when combined with descriptive techniques.
You can reach him via
Team Topologies Advocacy
Truls views Team Topologies as the logical organizational consequence of the findings in “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps” and the resources available on DORA. He offers the following advice for leading autonomous teams in the age of autonomy:
Approach each team with respect for their autonomy.
Inspire the team to want to achieve the desired outcomes by focusing on the "why" rather than the "how."
Provide helpful guidance and tools, such as platform capabilities.
Adapt challenges to each team's context and abilities, recognizing that each team is unique.
Avoid exceeding the total cognitive capacity of the team.
Our approach to modern technical leadership was presented in Matthew Skelton's track “Optimizing for Speed & Flow” at QCon London 2022, titled "Optimising for Fast Flow in Norway's Largest Bureaucracy." The full transcript and video can be found on InfoQ.
An InfoQ article where Audun Fauchals Stand and I expand further on the topic can be found here.
The presentation “From Four Releases a Year to Once Every Minute” was originally held at Gene Kim's “Enterprise DevOps Summit.” The video is available here.
Another version, including Q&A from the Unleash Web Seminar, can be found here.
