Organization dynamics for fast flow in humane organizations
Do you feel your organization isn't agile and adaptive despite having invested in Agile and DevOps adoption?
Struggling to adapt to a rapidly evolving market while battling change fatigue? Perhaps you're facing intensified competition or grappling with the consequences of a botched reorganization, leaving your teams disengaged and overwhelmed.
If you're searching for clarity and predictability, it's time to address these pain points head-on.
Let's pave the way for collaborative adaptation and revitalize your organization's ability to deliver value effectively in the face of challenges.
Our holistic approach allows you to understand why your Agile and DevOps efforts have hit a ceiling and how to break through. We assess as a system the combination of your architecture, your processes and the team-of-teams organization underpinning them. We assess this combination for fitness and design better interaction patterns for teams to accelerate flow.
Guided, Impactful, Proven: Streamline Your Success with Team Topologies
Unlock the power of Team Topologies with confidence. We know you want a solution which is sustainable and scalable but it is often not easy to know where to start. We have many ways in which we can support your organization. After a brief and free discovery session, we will identify and craft with you a path in which you will be accompanied by experts to ensure the best possible outcome for your organization. From setting up your own Fast Flow enabling team to collaborating with you intensely on a pilot to get those first tangible results. We have your back with support tailored to your organizations needs.
Ready to Fast-track the Value Stream Flow in Your organization?
We empower visionary leaders like you to turn your bold organizational visions into reality by fostering fast-flow, stream-aligned teams of teams that accelerate value delivery and more. This will enable you to navigate uncertainty with confidence and conviction.
The flow of value is defined and often restricted by the interplay of three different elements of the same socio-technical system:
The architecture
The processes (Agile & DevOps)
The team interaction patterns
Tweaking any single element of the trio in isolation would only create a suboptimal and potentially dysfunctional system. You are only as fast as the slowest element of the system.
A tightly coupled architecture will trim the potential of even the best agile software delivery teams, while slow and interrupted processes implemented on the path to production will cripple your ability to adapt to changes in the environment and capture market opportunities.
Last but not least, lack of intentional team interactions design and/or good boundaries definition introduces blockers to flow in the form of team dependencies and waiting times. This will cripple even the most mature agile teams working on a sound and decoupled architecture.
Get the guidance you need to design a more effective and streamlined team-of-teams organization.
✅ By embracing a humane approach and fostering an environment where creativity thrives, organizations can inspire their teams to bring their full selves to work.
✅ Considering flat structures and prioritizing a team-first approach can promote agility and adaptability.
✅ Recognizing that Agile methodologies alone aren't the sole answer to business agility. It's about finding a holistic approach that empowers teams and fosters a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
WHAT LEADERS YOUCAN TRUST SAY ABOUT US…
Proven Value
Someone from your company may have already heard about Team Topologies. This is the impact of adopting Team Topologies has had on some organizations. Although Team Topologies has generated millions globally for adopting it, we can't fully measure its impact on all individuals who have implemented its principles. There may also be advocates within your organization.
30% faster transformation implementation with Team Topologies, enabling quicker time-to-market for new offerings.
25% reduction in context switching and a subsequent 20% increase in overall productivity among teams adopting Team Topologies.
40% drop in deployment failures and a 35% decrease in mean time to recovery, bolstering organizational resilience through the adoption of Team Topologies.
Who is using Team Topologies
Why aren't feature teams ideal for fast flow?
Why feature teams, tiger teams are NOT ideal for Fast Flow?
The Team Topologies approach is intentionally working with Stream-aligned Teams. They are autonomous, long-lived product teams.
Unlike feature teams, the stream-aligned teams provide continuous stewardship over the product/products which are part of the value stream. Stream-aligned teams are also focused on fairly independent boundaries, which allows them to autonomously ship value end-to-end.
Obstacle to Fast Flow #1: Blocking dependencies & handovers
Functionally siloed organizational pattern is widely adopted in traditional organizations. Even if they practice DevOps, there are plenty of handovers on the path to production introducing plenty of delays and waiting times.
Not only value is slowed down, but such organizations see great amount of inefficiency due to wait times for very expensive product teams.
Obstacles to Fast Flow #1: Blocking dependencies & handovers
Obstacle to Fast Flow #2: High cognitive load & teams pulled in many directions
Obstacle to Fast Flow #2: High cognitive load & teams pulled in many directions
The cognitive load is one of the most critical aspects of Developer Experience (DevEx). Software that is too big to keep in our heads requires more time (time to switch over or refresh the contextual knowledge), causes more bugs and rework, reduces the opportunity to form mastery in the domain and produce innovative ideas or breakthroughs.
Obstacle to Fast Flow #3: Unaware of Conway’s Law & socio-technical systems
Too often leadership decisions are made without regard of their impacts on whole system. This leads to a suboptimal, imbalanced state of the system, which produces results slower, produces bad results or no results at all.
A badly coupled architecture will always win over high-performing software teams. There is a better way…
Obstacle to Fast Flow #3: Unaware of Conway’s Law & socio-technical systems
Obstacle to Fast Flow #4: Org charts restricting communication
Obstacle to Fast Flow #4: Org charts restricting communication
We have known this for several decades - our org charts do NOT represent how work gets done. Many organizations try to compensate for the deficiencies of funcitonally siloed design by promoting company-wide collaboration. While this sounded great a couple of decades ago, we now know that collaboration (interaction) between teams is not the same as collaboration within a team or between a product team and their customer.
Collaboration is expensive, slows down team’s productivity and needs to be purposeful.
Leader’s Golden Path to Stream-aligned Organizations
Team Topologies is a clear, easy-to-follow approach to modern software delivery with an emphasis on optimizing team interactions for flow.
Four fundamental types of team and three core team interaction modes combine with awareness of Conway’s Law, team cognitive load, and responsive organization evolution to define a no-nonsense, team-friendly, humanistic approach to building and running software systems. The approach is based on years of experience AND research of the modern software delivery patterns adopted by many successful organizations.
The power of Enabling Teams
Enabling Teams are often the easiest and fastest way to gain value flow acceleration.
The best way to start is by applying the Team Interaction Modelling practice to your context and identifying the place where Enabling Teams would deliver immediately the high impact. This and the other videos below from the Team Topologies Distilled course on the Academy gives you the bite size understanding of what Enabling teams are.
Effective Enabling Teams