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What is Team Topologies? Is it a framework? Is it a set of principles? How can you start using it without having a big-bang, top-down approach? And is that ever the right approach?
In a recorded interview from the Acceler8IT Conference in Krakow, Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies, sat down with Sabine Wojcieszak from getNextIT to discuss the practical and human-centered value of Team Topologies in modern workplaces. Their conversation delves into the potential of this flexible framework, which promotes adaptive team structures, reducing cognitive load, and nurturing a sense of security and fulfillment at work.
In our recent Project to Product Open Forum, we gathered leaders, practitioners, and transformation experts to explore the challenges and opportunities of moving from a project-centric to a product-centric way of working. The conversation couldn’t have been more timely; with only 2% of organizations fully mature in these transformation attempts and with a failure rate of 70% for business transformations, the shift is proving to be more difficult than anticipated for many organizations.
People should look at Team Topologies as a way of thinking or a pattern language. Team Topologies aims to help leaders design for a fast flow of value. It allows you to design a team-of-teams organization, which, combined with a relevant decoupled architecture of products and the appropriate processes (think Continuous Delivery as one example), allows even big organizations to achieve fast flow of value. Unlike organizational charts, the resulting diagrams are just a starting point and must continuously evolve as the organization grows and changes along with the environment in which it operates. This is why we often tell people to consider Team Topologies more like Design Thinking, i.e., an iterative and continuous process that helps you understand complex challenges and find optimal solutions.
This article explores the synergy between the Kanban method and Team Topologies to enhance work processes in knowledge work organizations. By making policies explicit, both methodologies facilitate clearer team interactions and improved workflow management. Discover how integrating these approaches can lead to evolutionary change and greater business agility.
This short case study describes a personal journey undertaken as a Team Topologies Advocate at a global financial services organization.
Key takeaways:
Most organizations never get the desired results from a reorganization
The 3-day offsite “reorg” is almost guaranteed to be a costly failure
A better approach is adaptive, continuous adjustment
Use open techniques from Team Topologies to shift and adapt the organization
I (João Rosa) recently created an online cohort-based course, Effectively Manage Team Cognitive Load. Since the release of Team Topologies book, I have adopted its language and principles in my consultancy practice, supporting organizations in their digital transformation journey. I’ve noticed in the field that more people are aware of the effects of unmanaged Team Cognitive Load in their teams and organizations, using the concept presented in the Team Topologies book to drive changes in their organizations.
With the help of the wider community the Team Topologies team shapes library is now available in many common diagramming tools including Miro, Lucid Chart, Figma, Diagrams.net, Google Draw, Google Slides and PowerPoint.
We spoke to Darren Murph - Head of Remote at GitLab - about the opportunities and challenges presented by remote working for organizations building software-based systems and services. We were keen to get his insights into team-centric approaches to remote work.
Matthew Skelton und Manuel Pais haben mit ihrem Buch “Team Topologies” eine ausgezeichnete Beschreibung der Herausforderungen moderner Enterprise IT vorgelegt und bieten ein Modell an, das in vielen Fällen als Vorlage für eine effiziente Organisation herangezogen werden kann.
Robert Ruzitschka erklaert.
During the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, the authors of the “Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow” book - Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais were interviewed by SolutionIQ’s Stas Zvinyatskovsky for the Agile Amped Podcast.
We spoke to Mark Phillips - author of Reinventing Communications - to discover insights into modern organizational dynamics from the viewpoint of project management and program management.
We spoke to Henny Portman to discover insights into modern organizational dynamics from the viewpoint of project management, programme management, and portfolio management.
Emily Webber is the author of the book Building Successful Communities of Practice and recently did extensive research (with anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar) into the size and engagement dynamics of various communities of practice with a particular focus on how the group dynamics change as the group size crosses certain thresholds. The research was published in the academic publication PLOS ONE.
We spoke to Emily about her research and what the implications are for designing and evolving organizations.
Deployment pipelines can really help Stream-aligned teams to deliver software changes independently:
Deployment pipelines can help to reinforce an independent flow of change for a Stream-aligned team. Don’t forget to enable rapid feedback via telemetry!
Define the endpoints external to the team - these represent the “outside world” from team perspective. These external endpoints should be outside or at the domain boundary.
There can be huge value in managing your deployment pipeline “as a Service or as a proper product, with product management approaches.
We spoke to Andy Nesling - Product Manager for IoT Cloud at Dyson - about his recent experiences with using agile software delivery approaches to span teams in mobile, cloud, and embedded software systems.
We recently talked with Scott Prugh, Chief Architect & SVP Software Engineering at CSG, about some of the patterns and anti-patterns in the DevOps Topologies online catalog (predecessor of the Team Topologies book). We explore how the topologies have helped shape team structures and interactions at CSG.
I recently joined Mike Kavis of Deloitte on his OnCloud podcast to talk about team communication for effective software delivery. We covered the original DevOps Topologies patterns and how these have been used in industry, and then talked about what’s in the book Team Topologies: well-defined team types, what we mean by a modern platform, team interaction modes, clear responsibility boundaries, DevEx, and using difficulties in team interactions as ‘signals’ to the organization that something is missing or misplaced. We also talked about moving beyond the Spotify model - success in software delivery is not just about team structures but about how teams interact and what kind of relationships they create, sustain, and evolve.
- authonomy
- autonomous teams
- beyond software
- book
- boundaries
- Business Agility
- cloud
- Cognitive load
- conferences
- Continuous Delivery
- cost saving
- DOES USA
- EDOSR
- fast flow
- heuristics
- independent-services
- industry
- interviews
- ish
- Leadership
- Leadership Teams
- modulatirty
- platform engineering
- platforms
- podcasts
- portfolio
- practices
- Product
- product teams
- project management
- Q&A
- remote
- remote-first
- strategy
- training
- twexit
- value stream
- value stream management
The book Team Topologies has been 5 or 6 years in the making. How did we (Manuel and I) come to write to book and why?
…
In our travels around the world helping organizations with software delivery practices, we noticed that organizations needed guidance on how to evolve team interactions. We also saw that in many organizations the boundaries between teams are very unclear: people were asking “why are we spending so much time working with that other team?” or “why is this service so difficult to use?” - very often there was little clarity about the purpose and duration of team-to-team interactions.