Moving beyond static team structures to interactions and dynamic evolution
Moving beyond static team structures to interactions and dynamic evolution
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - co-authors of the book Team Topologies - discuss the need to move beyond static organizational structures and embrace dynamic, learning organizations where certain team interactions are explicitly specified and expected.
Transcript:
Manuel Pais:
It kind of evolved organically as we were working with different clients, we were seeing what worked and what didn’t work, trying to help them shape the way their teams work together, how they interacted and so on. It kind of evolved from the original DevOps Topologies which became quite famous, let’s say, in a way - they’ve been referenced a lot and we went on to write the book “Team Topologies” that IT Revolution Press is going to publish and where we expand the ideas of the DevOps Topologies to a wider scope of IT and how business relates to IT and how to improve the flow of work of teams in today’s world, where there is more and more demand to go faster but still have quality in what you deliver and it’s really important to think about how teams interact and how they’re structured.
Matthew Skelton:
I think that’s one of the main things that comes out of the book isn’t it? The interactions between teams, the connections between different parts of the organization as a system which are some of the new ideas in the book that haven’t really been talked about before. Going back to the original kind of DevOps Topologies - they’re quite static. Lots of organizations have found them really useful, so we know that Netflix, for example, found them very useful in thinking about how the teams in Netflix were organized and we also know that a big publishing company Condé Nast International - they found them really useful too. Lots of other organizations have found them to be helpful in thinking about how their teams into-relate.
But the thing that’s new in the “Team Topologies” book is (several things): one is this - the way in which teams interact what we call ‘team interaction modes’ - that’s about setting expectations for people in teams to know how they should talk to other teams. Some other things as well, like like cognitive load and Conway’s law and things that we have brought together. As far as we know this is the first time that someone has brought them together in this way to talk about team interactions and the kind of organization as a system or organism in this way, isn’t it?
