A Blueprint for a Better Society: Operationalising Team Topologies in the UK Public Sector
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Authors: Ben Davison (Co-Founder & CIO, Axiologik) and Polly Price (Award-Winning Consultant & Yorkshire Rising Star, Axiologik)
Interviewed by Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies.
“Team Topologies is ... a blueprint for a more responsive, efficient, and compassionate public sector. By organizing teams around flow, using data to align stakeholders, and committing to thin, self-service platforms, the UK public sector can break free from expensive, slow, and disjointed delivery models. ”
Executive Summary and key takeaways
In complex, regulated public sector environments, digital transformation is historically high-risk, expensive, and slow. Legacy setups are plagued by archaic infrastructure, intertwined dependencies, and organizational inertia. At Axiologik—a digital delivery consultancy specializing in large-scale agendas with high societal impact—we specialize in implementing "fast flow" in these spaces.
Through key engagements with the National Health Service (NHS), the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), and the Home Office, we have demonstrated that Team Topologies is a powerful catalyst for a better society. This case study details our journey, contrasting past failures with pandemic-era breakthroughs, analyzing how Team Topologies was operationalised across vaccination booking, testing, UKHSA threat responses, and immigration systems, and outlining recommendations for UK public sector leaders.
Five Key Takeaways
Compelling Case for Change: Transforming public sector digital services requires an urgent case for change to overcome institutional inertia and align stakeholders.
De-coupled Architecture and Teams: Establishing stream-aligned teams with independent pipelines is essential for rapid, self-directed delivery.
Inclusive Stakeholder Alignment: Systemic issues cannot be resolved by tech teams alone; they require bringing financial and policy decision-makers into the room.
Data-Driven Accountability: Providing teams with balanced flow and quality metrics drives complete ownership of their end-to-end outcomes.
Thinnest Viable Platforms (TVPs): Highly configurable, thin platforms enable public organizations to respond to novel, unpredictable crises in a matter of days.
1. The Historical Context and Problems Prior to Team Topologies
Historically, the UK public sector struggled with digital transformation; a 2019 Deloitte survey showed healthcare professionals associated it with "expensive, slow, complicated, and disjointed". A pervasive "outlier syndrome" existed, with agencies believing regulatory or cultural differences made fast flow impossible. This inertia and complexity manifested in several major public sector initiatives prior to consciously optimising for flow.
The NHS National Spine
Ten years prior to the pandemic, the NHS National Spine was a massive £1 billion programme bottlenecked by its delivery model. It suffered from excruciatingly long 18-month release cycles. Deployments took a week and frequently broke in production. The resulting operational strain was immense: teams regularly worked nights and weekends, often causing developer burnout within a year. The programme was significantly behind its original business case, with both the NHS and delivery partners footing the extensive additional cost.
NHS Pathways (111 Online)
NHS Pathways is the clinical algorithm and infrastructure sitting beneath the 111 online service. It triages patient symptoms for serious conditions, guiding them to appropriate clinical care. Prior to the pandemic, iterating on this highly complex algorithm typically took three months within a scheduled release cycle with extensive clinical safety assurance. In a fast-moving crisis like COVID-19, where clinical understandings of symptoms changed rapidly, this three-month release cycle was at odds with the need to change public guidance on a daily basis.
Conventional Clinical Risk Management
Within the healthcare sector, the pace of IT system change had traditionally been slowed down by the need for extensive clinical assurance to ensure systems were ‘safe’. The standard clinical risk philosophy was that slower releases, heavily assured at the end of lengthy development cycles was the best way to eliminate clinical risk. This typically resulted in larger release sizes, with higher risk of safety issues emerging late in the day. The resulting bottlenecks in flow often created tension between engineering and clinical teams, as a result.
The UK Home Office (Immigration Digital Transformation)
From 2017 onwards, the UK Home Office undertook a major digital transformation of its immigration systems within its Immigration Technology directorate, covering everything from visas and citizenship to caseworking and removals. By 2017, Immigration Technology had made substantial investments in cloud infrastructure and Agile methodologies. However, they still suffered from highly complex release cycles, tight coupling of services, and a slow, disjointed pace of delivery. The organisation struggled with systemic inertia, lacking a unified case for change to align different departments.
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2. Implementing Team Topologies and Fast Flow Across Contexts
To overcome these deeply entrenched problems, Axiologik partnered with these public agencies to introduce the principles of Team Topologies and fast flow. We focused relentlessly on organizing around flow, removing wait times, and building high-performing, multi-disciplinary teams.
Redefining Clinical Safety: COVID Testing and Twice-Daily Releases
One remarkable transformation occurred within NHS Digital under the clinical direction of Professor Jonathan Benger, NHS Digital’s UK Chief Medical Officer and member of SAGE. NHS Digital were responsible for establishing the central digital systems to support COVID Testing, with Axiologik responsible for leading the implementation. With Axiologik intentionally gearing the technology and operating model for fast flow, Professor Benger soon realised that the typically slow pace of clinical assurance could become a risk to public safety. Having read Team Topologies and buoyed by the principles of fast flow, he oversaw the systemic shift of clinical assurance ‘to the left’, engaging clinicians in the earliest stage of the lifecycle to eliminate risk ‘by design’. By partnering with design teams to continuously improve design patterns and supported by extensive automated testing, safety experts were able to focus manual reviews on the highest risk areas. With silos broken down the COVID testing system executed two production releases per day by December 2021—an unprecedented achievement in clinical healthcare. A key contributor to this achievement was the intentional focus on flow and the importance of team interactions, with Team Topologies providing a common vocabulary and framework for improvement across silos.
COVID-19 Response: The Vaccine Booking System
During the pandemic, there was an urgent need to build a national vaccine booking system. This task required population segmentation, eligibility cohort management, supply chain logistics, and real-time integration back to clinical records. By organizing around Team Topologies principles, Axiologik and the NHS stood up this complex, secure system in just three months. Instead of a single monolith, we broke the architecture into decoupled value streams managed by dedicated, stream-aligned teams, allowing the platform to scale rapidly and process massive volumes seamlessly over nine months.
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UKHSA and the "Thinnest Viable Platform"
Formed in 2021, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) protects the UK from novel health threats. To deliver agility at low cost, UKHSA deliberately structured its digital estate using Team Topologies concepts, focusing on "Thinnest Viable Platforms" (TVPs) and configurable self-service solutions. These platforms are configured directly by business users rather than requiring custom coding. In the early days of tracing, using these techniques coupled with modern engineering principles allowed us to reduce the cycle time of changes to the integration between pathology labs and trace systems from circa 40 days, to less than 1. In a later example, this approach was proven to be a critical enabler during the monkeypox outbreak; using this TVP framework, the UKHSA team deployed a fully operational solution in just five working days. The technology was ready even sooner, with availability of business stakeholders the rate limiting factor.
UK Home Office: Pioneering Decoupled Operating Models Within Immigration Technology
At the UK Home Office, starting in early 2018, Axiologik helped pioneer a "decoupled delivery operating model" that closely mirrored Team Topologies. Tightly coupled system dependencies were broken apart and stream-aligned teams put in place. Centralized technical capabilities were aligned into full-stack, end-to-end teams, allowing them to take full ownership of their products. A data-driven approach to flow improvement was implemented, measuring end-to-end value stream effectiveness and systematically removing blockers and bottlenecks. Statistical throughput analysis was also used to eliminate delivery variations and improve predictability.
Since the Home Office lacked a top-down mandate initially, we used "guerrilla tactics" to drive adoption, establishing engineering guilds and tech talks to connect siloed teams. This grassroots movement infused engineers with passion, gradually establishing a modern, decoupled product model. In combination, this combination of measures across structure, process, technology and culture delivered dramatic increases in effectiveness, with a 400% increase in throughput whilst also reducing like-for-like cost by 30%.
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3. The Outcomes of Fast Flow and Team Topologies
By shifting from functional silos and monolithic release cycles to Team Topologies, these UK public sector organisations achieved extraordinary, tangible outcomes:
NHS Pathways (111 Online): The release cycle for updating the critical clinical triaging algorithm was slashed from three months to under 24 hours, enabling rapid responses to changing pandemic symptoms.
National Vaccine Booking System: A massive, multi-integrated national system was delivered from scratch in three months and scaled to handle tens of millions of users without major incident.
COVID Testing Software: Achieved a cadence of two clinical-grade releases per day, transforming clinical risk management from a bottleneck into a collaborative, automated "shift-left" partner.
UKHSA Agility: Created a highly resilient, low-cost operational model that deployed a new disease-tracking platform for monkeypox in five working days, followed by rapid adaptations for urban influenza.
UK Home Office Resilience: The transition to decoupled products, mature independent pipelines, and self-service platforms gave the Home Office the extreme agility required to respond to major global crises within key enterprise platforms. For example, when the UK government needed to act rapidly in response to the war in Ukraine (i.e. processing emergency visas), the modernised Home Office caseworking platform allowed rapid policy developments to be accommodated quickly and safely.
Elimination of Burnout: By breaking down massive releases into small, automated, and continuous flows, agencies eliminated the toxic practice of weekend-long deployments and subsequent staff burnout.
4. Key Recommendations for the UK Public Sector
Drawing on our experiences, we offer five vital recommendations for public sector leaders seeking to implement Team Topologies:
I. Establish a Compelling Case for Change
Organisational inertia is the greatest barrier to fast flow. Leaders cannot enact change merely by mandating "best practices" or running generic transformations that rename roles (like "Release Train Engineer") without altering behaviours. To overcome inertia, you must build a compelling case for change. This requires translating technical IT metrics (like cycle time or DORA metrics) into terms that resonate with non-technical executives. In the public sector, this means framing problems around financial waste (e.g., "every day of delay costs the taxpayer £100,000") or societal impact (e.g., "this policy will take twelve months longer to reach citizens").
II. Align the Right Stakeholders
Systemic delivery issues cannot be resolved by technical teams alone; you must bring all core stakeholders into the room. Engaging only tech teams simply shifts bottlenecks elsewhere. Ensure business stakeholders controlling funding are active participants. When we brought financial decision-makers into the room for a Fortune 500 client, a product that had melted down every January for two consecutive years sailed through its peak flawlessly, because we had the authority to break apart services and resolve systemic blocks.
III. Provide Broad, Balanced Data to Drive Accountability
To foster continuous improvement, furnish teams with objective, undisputed data. Do not let teams focus on a single parameter like speed. Measuring only cycle time encourages faster but buggier releases, shifting problems to operational support. Provide a balanced scorecard of flow, quality, and stability metrics. This broad visibility naturally encourages teams to take end-to-end accountability for all outcomes, acting as a powerful motivator.
IV. Seek Top-Down Sponsorship
Grassroots efforts, such as engineering guilds and tech talks, are fantastic for building early momentum. However, achieving true fast flow across a large, regulated organisation is extremely difficult without top-down sponsorship. Without formal alignment, you will not secure the funding to break apart monolithic legacy services or invest in automated pipelines. Pair grassroots tactics with strong executive sponsorship from the outset.
V. Pursue the "Thinnest Viable Platform"
Avoid building bloated, highly customized central platforms. Follow the UKHSA model of building highly configurable, thin, self-service platforms (TVPs) that can be directly leveraged by stream-aligned teams. By minimizing cognitive load and providing clear self-service boundaries, you enable the entire organization to adapt to unpredictable, fast-moving crises with maximum speed and minimum cost.
Conclusion
Team Topologies is far more than a software delivery guideline; it is a blueprint for a more responsive, efficient, and compassionate public sector. By organizing teams around flow, using data to align stakeholders, and committing to thin, self-service platforms, the UK public sector can break free from expensive, slow, and disjointed delivery models. The pandemic proved that given clear purpose and the right environment, the public sector can deliver digital services at a pace that rivals any private enterprise. It is now up to public sector leaders to establish that compelling case for change and build a better society.
Next steps: applying Team Topologies at scale
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About the authors:
Ben Davison, Co-Founder & CIO, Axiologik
Polly Price, Award-Winning Consultant & Yorkshire Rising Star, Axiologik
