Newsletter (August 2024): Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) - Enhancing Modularity and Autonomy

13 Aug

Independent Service Heuristics(ISH) are a set of simple questions that help have discussions and design discussions for creating modular, autonomous, and efficient teams within an organization. As Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, the authors of Team Topologies, explain, these heuristics guide the structuring of services to optimize team performance and service maintainability.

Understanding Independent Service Heuristics

They are guidelines that help teams design services with clear boundaries, minimal dependencies, and high cohesion. These heuristics focus on ensuring that services can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, enabling faster delivery and more resilient systems.

When applying ISH, you should choose a focus area for software representation (e.g., user journey, product, business domain, software service, application, user tasks, value stream) and use the checklist to assess it. The following shows the checklist typically used in the ISH assessment:

Sense-Check: Is it logical to offer this as a service?
Brand: Can it be branded as a public cloud service (e.g., AvocadoOnline.com 🥑)?
Revenue/Customers: Can it generate recurring revenue with subscription plans?
Cost Tracking: Can we track costs and investment separately from similar services?
Data: Are the input data needs clearly defined?
User Personas: Does it meet specific user needs?
Teams: Can a team effectively build and operate this service?
Dependencies: Can the team act independently of other teams?
Impact/Value: Does it provide significant impact and engagement for the team?
Product Decisions: Can the team own their product roadmap and direction?

Identifying and removing these blockers enables organizations to create an environment conducive to fast flow and continuous improvement.

More "Yes" or "Maybe" answers indicate a strong candidate for a separate stream of change, suitable for Stream-Aligned teams, as seen in the Docker and Improbable case studies. When there are clusters of “No”, this is an indication that we may need to do some further investigation or this candidate boundary may not be a good one.

This exercise is very simple and can be explained in a matter of minutes, which means that it is easy to be done with technical and non-technical people that know about the areas of business we want to do the exercise.

There are more guidelines that can help you to get started in this GitHub repository. Team Topologies Valued Practitioners are available to help you throughout your journey.

Get a head start and adopt Independent Service Heuristics faster by bringing your entire team on a “Foundation Workshop - Find good boundaries for flow using Independent Service Heuristics” with the creators of Team Topologies. This hands-on workshop teaches participants to use Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) to discover and validate effective team boundaries for improved flow, drawing on Team Topologies principles. Topics include understanding ISH, applying it to refine boundaries, enhancing flow, improving communication, and aligning boundaries with organizational goals.

Why You Should Implement Independent Service Heuristics (ISH)

Enhanced Modularity: Services designed with Independent Service Heuristics are modular, making it easier to manage changes, scale components, and troubleshoot issues.
Improved Autonomy: Teams responsible for independent services can work more autonomously, reducing the need for cross-team coordination and enabling faster decision-making. There is an interesting take on autonomy in the context of remote work in this interview with Darren Murph from GitLab on remote work.
Increased Resilience: Loose coupling and encapsulation reduce the risk of cascading failures and improve the system's ability to recover from issues.
Faster Delivery: Independent services can be developed, tested, and deployed more quickly, accelerating the overall delivery process.

Jumpstart ISH adoption with us

Jumpstart your team's adoption of Independent Service Heuristics with the "Foundation Workshop" by the creators of Team Topologies, designed to teach effective boundary discovery and validation for improved flow and communication.

Strategies to Implement Independent Service Heuristics (ISH)

Getting started with ISH involves several strategies that align closely with the principles outlined in the book. Firstly, understanding the concept of natural fracture planes is crucial. These are the natural points within a system where a division can happen with minimal communication overhead between teams. By identifying these fracture planes, teams can be formed around services that are independently deployable and scalable. This approach minimizes dependencies and enhances the flow of work, as emphasized in "Team Topologies".

*An example of potential fracture planes for Footprints taken from one of our Guided Discovery Workshops.*

Another key strategy is the iterative assessment and refinement of team boundaries. Using ISH, teams can continuously evaluate and adjust their boundaries to better support the flow of value. This involves regularly reviewing how well the current boundaries support fast flow and making necessary adjustments to reduce friction. By aligning team boundaries with organizational goals and value streams, as recommended in "Team Topologies", organizations can ensure that their team structures support strategic objectives and deliver maximum value. These strategies collectively help in creating an efficient and responsive organizational structure.

Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton have dedicated an entire chapter to trust boundaries in their Team Topologies Distilled video course.

Learn to discover effective boundaries

Learn how to discover effective boundaries for improved flow and communication. Save your spot on the Independent Service Heuristics Foundation Workshop by the creators of Team Topologies

ISH at Zalora

In 2021, Zalora, a leading fashion and lifestyle destination in Southeast Asia, adopted Team Topologies principles to improve customer experience and reduce time-to-market. During a workshop led by Team Topologies co-author Matthew Skelton, stakeholders learned to use Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) to identify and discuss flow-aligned boundaries. Following the workshop, Zalora conducted internal sessions using ISH to enhance collaboration across various departments, including technology, product, logistics, and business strategy. This approach facilitated better communication and alignment, leading Zalora to contribute three new heuristics—Dependencies, Impact/Value, and Product Decisions—to the ISH collection.

In our August 2021 workshop with Matthew Skelton, the Independent Service Heuristics framework transformed our discussions on team structure, helping us identify new stream-aligned teams and redefine others as platform, complex-subsystem, and enabling teams. This visual, grid-based approach enhanced our team’s autonomy and productivity, allowing us to further refine our insights and contribute to the ISH code repository for others to benefit.
— Liam Hutchinson, Group Director of Product, Zalora

What’s Coming Up Next?

Check out the full list of events to see which one is best suited for you. If we missed any, send us an email and we will list it and spread the word.

Expert Leadership Masterclass with Matthew & Manuel

Gain deeper insights into Team Topologies principles, understand investment needs for fast flow transformation, and get hands-on experience with Team Interaction Modeling. Save your spot at an Early-Bird rate of £450 until August 31st

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