Tools and resources to accelerate value through adoption of Team Topologies
On this page: We have curated the best tools to help you on your journey. The page has several sections covering various tools and practices to help you with different areas.
Readiness | Cognitive Load | Adoption | Templates
Team Topologies Assessment
Assess different areas of your organization for fast flow of value and get guidance on where and how to start.
The assessment covers 10 key dimensions of organizational agility. These act as prerequisites to enable fast flow of value. They show where your organization is in terms of being flow-oriented or hindered by organizational processes and suggest on how to improve.
Why complete the assessment?
You’ll get recommendations for the next steps in your journey towards fast flow of value.
We’ll email you a full report that outlines your organization’s preparedness and a set of recommendations and next steps for the optimal operating model and capabilities to achieve fast flow of value. It includes a visual representation of where your organization is on the 10 measures.
Our team of coaches and practitioners offer also a deep dive, aka Expert Review & Assessment providing actionable insights. It takes a few weeks and covers your architecture/s, SDLC processes and team-of-teams organization. Get in touch if you are interested in this engagement.
Adoption Tools & Practices
Independent Service Heuristics
When designing organisations for a fast flow of change, we need to find effective boundaries between different streams of change in order to ensure that we create good team boundaries. This can be achieved by identifying potential boundaries across services, domains, applications or streams. This article looks at how you can do this using a technique called Independent Service Heuristics (ISH).
The Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) are rules-of-thumb (clues) for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product.
Team Interaction Modeling
Getting started with modeling your team-of-teams organization?
This article introduces the mechanics of modeling and continuously evolving the design of your organization based on understanding of the cognitive load of teams.
Team Topologies is more about purposeful design of interactions between teams and definition of the team boundaries, than labelling teams of one type or another. This article will help you make sure you see tangible business impact from your design.
Remote First Team Interaction
Remote-first work is the "new normal" for companies around the world. There is no shortage of advice on how individual teams can bond and work effectively remotely.
However, there is not much on how to address remote interactions between different teams that need to collaborate remotely, as part of the same value stream. Moving from the physical to the online world can further expose pre-existing interaction problems, increase wait times and slow down delivery and possibly response to incidents.
User Needs Mapping for boundaries
In many organizations, team and service boundaries were historically defined by things like technology, process, or architecture tier (for N-tier systems). However, in the context of a fast flow of change for user-centric systems, it can be valuable to let user needs shape and influence team and service boundaries. This is where User Needs Mapping can help.
User Needs Mapping is a term coined by Rich Allen, a TTVP, during the preparation of some of the Team Topologies official Guided Workshops, and is based on one of the early stages of the Wardley Mapping process.
ThinNest Viable Platform Template & Examples
The interesting thing about platform is - it's maybe not the platform's of the past, because platforms of the past often in many organizations were great big great massive things, very difficult to use - black boxes and teams had to use them - it's mandatory to use these things and it was awful to use in many cases, not everywhere but often these platforms are just awful.
The platforms we're talking about have placed a strong focus on developer experience, they see other development teams as their customers effectively. They run the platform as a product or service really thinking about what's their experience in using them.
Team APIs Template
Team APIs is probably the most critical tool for sustaining your Team Topologies design and understand where you need to evolve it. We already see tools trying to implement Team APIs in some form and we hear organizations are finding ways to capture team APIs in different ways.
We have designed a sample team API structure, which you can use in a tool of your choice.
The template for defining a Team API is on GitHub.
Based on some of the ideas in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton @matthewskelton and Manuel Pais @manupaisable.
Templates & Shapes
The modeling shapes exist in various formats to help your workshops on designing team interactions.
You can find (1) templates for most diagraming software, e.g. the official Miro plugin we have devloped (2) download in pdf printable shapes to cut out and use on the table with your team or (3) buy reusable cardboard shapes from Agile Stationery
How to use the shapes
Watch Matthew Skelton explain the intended use of the printed shapes with an example.
Remember to check the Team Interaction Modeling article for step-by-step guidance on best practices and usage of the modeling shapes.
Free printABLE Team Modeling shapes
Designed by the authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais and battle-tested in training sessions around the world, these printed shapes are officially the fastest way to model and visualise different options for team responsibilities and interactions based on the ideas in the Team Topologies book.
Remember to check the Team Interaction Modeling article for guidance on best practices and usage of the modeling shapes.
Buy pre-cut Team Modeling shapes
We have partnered with Agile Stationery to offer people, who love or prefer the tactile interactive workshop experience, reusable shapes.
Remember to check the Team Interaction Modeling article for guidance on best practices and usage of the modeling shapes.
Free diagramming templates
We have templates of the shapes for most of the popular diagraming and visualization tools, e.g. Miro, Figma, Lucidchart, PowerPoint, Google Slides and more. We keep them all on GitHub. If your tool of choice is missing in the templates, we would love to feature your template. Get in touch.
Remember to check the Team Interaction Modeling article for guidance on best practices and usage of the modeling shapes.
Cognitive Load Tools
Cognitive load is a central theme for the adoption and evolution of Team Topologies. It is equally important for both business and technology teams.
Unfortunately, measuring cognitive load is still a rather challenging area and there is lack of tools to help leaders understand better the current cognitive load of their teams as well as the evolution of it.
We have used a number of research studies in the area and work with data scientists to be able to provide you with a tool which delivers insights for your most important decisions around team-of-teams organizational design.
Teamperature is currently in restricted beta and you can join the waiting list.
Readiness | Cognitive Load | Adoption | Templates
Background info
The original DevOps Team Topologies patterns
In 2013, Matthew Skelton published the original DevOps team topologies patterns, which have become the industry standard for discussing the merits and drawbacks of different team designs for software delivery. Since 2015, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais have been curating the DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstoplogies.com
The DevOps team topologies patterns compare and contrast effective and ineffective patterns for organizing teams for modern software delivery. These patterns are point-in-time snapshots of team relationships.
The DevOps Topologies collection of patterns (diagrams and descriptions) by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Use these shapes to model organisation design and team interactions within your organisation based on the ideas in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. Designed by the authors and battle-tested in training sessions around the world, these shapes help to visualise and explore different options for team responsibilities and interactions for organisations building modern software systems.
The shapes are indicated in the PDF with dotted lines. Simply print the PDF then cut along the dotted lines to use the shapes.
Remember to check the Team Interaction Modelling article for guidance on best practices and usage of the modelling shapes.
NOTE: you can also buy pre-cut shapes from our partner Agile Stationery - worldwide shipping.