A data-driven approach to fast flow using Team Topologies principles at EBSCO
Authors: Nicole Casellini, Scott Cummings, Steve Whitaker (EBSCO Information Services), and Matthew Skelton (Conflux)
The Challenge: Outgrowing Traditional Structures
After seven years of success with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), EBSCO Information Services, a leading provider of research databases, found itself at a crossroads. The company’s growth had created increasingly complex challenges that their existing Agile Release Train (ART) structure struggled to address. Teams were fragmented across multiple solutions without end-to-end ownership. Dependencies multiplied, cognitive load increased, and delivery speed slowed—all threatening EBSCO’s ability to deliver consistent value to customers.
“Our teams were drowning in dependencies,” explains Nicole Casellini, VP of the Lean Enterprise Office at EBSCO. “We had parts of solutions owned by different teams rather than teams owning complete solutions, creating handoffs that slowed everything down.”
This organizational friction manifested in concrete challenges:
Teams lacked end-to-end ownership of value streams.
Alignment across teams became increasingly difficult to maintain.
Excessive work-in-progress complicated delivery.
High cognitive load affected both productivity and team morale.
EBSCO recognized that incremental improvements wouldn’t solve these structural issues. They needed a fundamental rethinking of how teams were organized around value delivery.
The Journey: From Discovery to Transformation
EBSCO partnered with Conflux, led by Team Topologies coauthor Matthew Skelton, to reimagine their organizational design. The transformation began with discovery sessions mapping team structures and value streams to establish a clear baseline.
Rather than jumping to solutions, Conflux guided EBSCO through a methodical diagnostic process using an early version of Independent Service Heuristics (ISH). This approach helped identify natural boundaries for team alignment based on value streams rather than technical architecture.
“Conflux'’s approach to breaking down development work across teams into digestible concepts is really well done,” notes Carl Grifalconi, VP Agile Development at EBSCO IS. “It's challenging to smoothly incorporate change into such a complex and interdependent set of architecture and functionality that we have at EBSCO, but we have seen real benefits.”
A crucial early insight was EBSCO’s readiness for change. Despite being a large organization with decades of established processes, EBSCO demonstrated characteristics of what organizational theorist Ron Westrum calls a “generative culture”—where information flows freely, failures lead to inquiry rather than blame, and risks are shared. As Skelton observed, “If you’re a pathological organization, then this stuff isn’t going to work. You need to be at least moving in the direction of generative.”
From Ownership to Stewardship: A Fundamental Shift
The transformation centered on a crucial mindset shift: moving from simple “ownership” of services to ongoing “stewardship.” Traditional ownership models often create territorial behaviors, while stewardship emphasizes continuous care and evolution of services to meet changing customer needs.
“The fundamental thing about stewardship is that it needs to evolve over time for better value flow,” explains Skelton. “In essence, every service or app should be fully stewarded end-to-end by a single team, with capacity for that team to learn and the service to evolve.”
This shift wasn’t merely semantic—it represented a profound change in how teams related to their work and to each other. For EBSCO, establishing clear responsibilities for services and applications became essential to the transformation journey.
Implementation: A Two-Phase Approach
EBSCO implemented their transformation through a structured, data-driven approach in two distinct phases:
Phase 1: Domain Definition and Alignment
The first phase focused on redefining organizational boundaries around value streams:
Enterprise Capabilities: EBSCO defined the fundamental capabilities needed for value delivery.
Domain Alignment: These capabilities were aligned into Enterprise Domains.
Resource Mapping: Components were mapped to logical applications within domains.
Team Alignment: Current teams were mapped to appropriate domains.
Enterprise domains emerged through capability affinity grouping, each operating as a distinct business unit with a single Business Owner driving strategic direction.
During this phase, the concept of platform teams evolved significantly—moving from seeing platforms as collections of technologies to viewing them as curated experiences for engineers and value consumers. This shift meant thinking about the experience first and technology second, creating platform services that actually reduced cognitive load rather than adding complexity.
Phase 2: Flow Optimization and Ownership Streamlining
With domains established, EBSCO turned its focus to optimizing flow and streamlining stewardship:
Aligning on component ownership and refactoring needs.
Prioritizing optimization work across multiple Program Increments.
Generating Domain/ART Canvases highlighting missions and success measures.
Updating systems to enable investment area reporting.
As platform teams matured, they adopted what might be called a “restaurant menu approach”—offering a set menu of services rather than creating custom solutions for every request. These deliberate constraints became liberating, allowing teams to execute and innovate more quickly within clear boundaries.
Measuring Success: Concrete Benefits
The transformation delivered substantial and measurable improvements:
Feature cycle time decreased by 26% over a two-year period.
Overall blockers reduced by 52%.
Dependency-related blockers decreased by 45%.
Priority 1 and 2 enterprise incidents reduced by 76%.
$9.1M in savings with a two-year ROI of 62%.
Payback on investment in just 1.2 years.
197 additional features delivered that wouldn't have been possible under the previous structure.
These metrics translated into tangible business impact, as one EBSCO customer reported: “We’ve seen a dramatic improvement in EBSCO’s delivery consistency over the past year. What stands out most is that EBSCO is now consistently meeting their promised deadlines and delivering exactly what they commit to.”
Beyond Metrics: Organizational Benefits
While the quantitative results were impressive, the qualitative improvements were equally significant:
Technical clarity: Platform boundaries and responsibilities became clearer, enhancing technical autonomy and eliminating redundant domains.
Team effectiveness: Teams completed work more efficiently with reduced blockers, increased capacity, and decreased cognitive load.
Craig Spara, Senior Software Engineer at EBSCO, highlighted a key benefit: “Becoming a full-stack development team has benefitted my team in so many ways; by removing the predecessor dependency a UI feature has on the API, allowing us to work on API and UI features in tandem which can reduce completion of both features to a single PI; avoiding user story level dependencies on other teams.”
Even skeptics were convinced by the results. Mike Gunning, SVP of Development at EBSCO, admitted: “At first I was skeptical that reorganizing the teams would have any significant benefit. However, once the Team Topologies work had completed, my development managers reported that they felt they had much less cognitive load and there was an increase in their job satisfaction.”
An Unexpected Benefit: Application Inventory
A critical byproduct of the transformation was EBSCO’s first comprehensive application inventory, establishing clear connections between business capabilities, applications, IT components, and responsible teams.
Scott Cummings, SVP Office of CIO at EBSCO, emphasized its importance: “I can’t emphasize enough the value of the application inventory. We’re being asked to drastically reduce the amount that running the business costs. You can’t do that if you don’t have an application inventory.”
This inventory created a foundation for application rationalization—a strategic initiative with substantial future cost-saving potential beyond the immediate improvements in delivery flow.
A Repeatable Playbook for Organizational Flow
Perhaps most valuable was the creation of a repeatable approach for ongoing organizational improvement. As Nicole Casellini notes: “One key takeaway is that we now have the tools to develop and maintain a consistent approach. We learned a lot about how we organize our teams and our general value stream, so if we need to reorganize or redesign into new enterprise capabilities or a new platform play, we have the playbook.”
Key Principles for Large-Scale Transformation
For organizations facing similar challenges, EBSCO’s journey highlights five key principles for implementing Team Topologies at scale:
Empowering teams via technology: Creating an environment where teams can deliver value autonomously with appropriate support.
Ongoing stewardship over project completion: Moving from “build and move on” to continuous care and evolution of services.
Sociotechnical systems thinking: Recognizing that effective delivery requires alignment of human and technical elements.
Fast flow through clear boundaries: Enabling rapid delivery by defining team interfaces that reduce coordination overhead.
Cognitive load management: Ensuring teams can effectively maintain and evolve their services without becoming overwhelmed.
As Steve Whitaker from EBSCO reflected: “As a result of all of this work, we have a better understanding of our own systems. In order to achieve this, we had to do a lot of mapping that didn’t previously exist, and we’ll continue to reap benefits from that understanding for quite some time.”
EBSCO's experience demonstrates that Team Topologies principles don’t just solve immediate delivery problems—they transform how organizations think about and deliver value, creating a more effective environment where teams can innovate and excel.
Next steps: applying Team Topologies at scale
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