Fast Flow of Value, Tangible Impact, Independence for your teams to continue the change in a sustainable way
Our purpose is enable as many leaders and their teams to leverage the Team Topologies approach, in order for them to deliver tangible positive impact on their business by creating an engaging, humane environment for their people.
Where we make a difference
Team Topologies for Leadership Teams
Team Topologies is an approach for team-of-teams design, which accelerates flow of value inside part or the whole oganization. This naturally requires leadership. With this focus area we aim to enable leadership teams with deeper understanding of the decision-making principles, the design principles and provide guidance on the best (less risky, higher impact) way forward.
We often get engaged for establishing leadership team alignment on key concepts, principles and approaches, as well as Expert Reviews & Assessment of transformation/transition approaches and strategic change initiatives which aim to make the organization more stream aligned, nimble and capable to respond to changes in the markets.
Team Topologies for Scaling Up
Startups, Scaleups and enterprises which have innovated on a new product, all face the challenge of finding the right pattern to scale without losing the agility and responsiveness to the market which they know. This more often than not is linked to establishing your first platform and platform grouping (teams). The move from a full stack product team to a combination of multiple product teams and a supporting platform needs clear principles.
The Team Topologies approach provides a set of clear practices, design principles and heuristics for designing the scalable architecture and matching team-of-teams design. It also provides you with a transition plan and ways to continue the sensing and responding to changes in your environment, which may prompt changes in the technical and human architecture of your organization.
Team Topologies for Fast Flow of Value
A great organizational design, which doesn’t accelerate value, a big transformation which leads to a new state with the same level of business agility, a project-to-product transformation with limited impact on value creation and product quality. All of those are symptoms of an ad-hoc approach without clear strategic execution and proven practices to focus on the right kind of impact for business results and for creating a more humane environment.
The Team Topologies approach helps leaders achieve fast flow of value regardless of the industry or history of failed transformations. Our holistic approach is based on years of research and balanced intervention across all 3 cornerstones for fast flow of value - (1) decoupled architecture, (2) SDLC processes, (3) team-of-teams design.
Team Topologies for Product-Driven Organizations
The project-to-product transformations are spreading like a wild fire and for a reason. Product teams are proven to create better products, higher impact and respond faster to change in their environment. There is plenty written when it comes to enabling this on a single team or product. The biggest challenges and risks are associated with transforming established organizations with plenty of history and legacy. How do you handle an abundance of products with the small number of people you have? How do you define good boundaries for platforms in order to achieve an accelerated flow of value instead of a new structure with the same slow or even slower pace of change.
We often get engaged to provide the thinking model, principles and help establish a repeatable model for companies on the path of becoming product and platform-driven organizations.
Team Topologies for Cloud
Cloud adoption was easy … when everything a team was building was a website, a mobile app and a non-complex application. As cloud adoption accelerates it moves to business critical products and services with increased expectation of security and compliance. It is less evident on how to scale the adoption of cloud, adopt cloud native architectures and build complex products with bigger organizations without exploding the costs and giving up on the promise of cloud for business agility. The Team Topologies concepts were born from years of research on how organizations succeed at scale with even faster flow of value.
We often get engaged to help the team-of-teams design, which matches the target technology architecture and the best-fit SDLC processes.
Team Topologies for Platform Engineering
In the spring of 2024, Gartner published the Platform Engineering Hype Cycle and indicated to IT and technology leaders what the Platform Engineering community has always known - you better be using Team Topologies for your Platform Engineering initiatives or they will end as every other introduction of a new tool with limited success and even less business impact. The Team Topologies book helped popularize and expand the Platform-as-a-Product concept and coined the term “Thinnest Viable Platform”.
We often get engaged to help leaders design sound Platform-as-a-Product strategies, execute Platform Engineering initiatives, which drive real change and tangible (measurable) value creation for the business.
Types of Engagements
Our engagements are designed very differently depending on the context and focus area in which we aim to make a difference (see above the focus areas). At helicopter view we can highlight three distinct approaches to our engagements.
Expert Review & Assessment (ERA) engagement
Duration: 2-4 weeks (depends on complexity and scope)
Purpose: This is a strategic engagement in which a crew of our experts provides a fast review and assessment of your organization (socio-technical architecture), transformation approaches, existing organizational designs, value streams and products with the aim to provide actionable insights, guidance and tips on how to accelerate flow of value. The impact is naturally limited and we cannot achieve the enablement of your team to be self-sufficient with the approach.
This engagement provides a taster of what is possible and how we work and can lead into other deep-dive engagements where we deliver a more tangible business impact.
LEadership Team engagement
Duration: 2-4 weeks (depends on complexity and scope)
Purpose: Enabling a leadership team to make better decisions using the Team Topologies approach principles and ideas. The enablement is tailored to the need of executives and senior leaders who are embarking or are already on a transformation journey. It assists with establishing of principles and heuristics for modern organizational design, decision-making and leadership style.
Fast Flow Enabling Team engagement
Duration: 8-12+ weeks (depends on complexity and scope)
Purpose: This is our most comprehensive approach often plugged in new or ongoing transformation initiatives. We focus both on building the capability inside your organization to continue with a repeatable approach (your Fast Flow Enabling Team) while delivering a design for fast flow of value. We will establish together the prioritization of value streams, coach you in adapting architectures through Domain-Driven Design, identifying good team boundaries and transitioning to a new team-of-teams design.
Impact engagement
Duration: 4-12 weeks (depends on complexity and scope)
Purpose: this is a rather contained engagement, where we solve a concrete challenge together with you, but it is rather limited in scope (e.g. specific product, specific value stream). Your team would adopt many of the techniques required to sustain the effort, yet the focus is first on acceleration of flow of value, then on enabling.
How We Engage
There is no silver bullet and a pre-canned step-by-step approach to success.
The Team Topologies approach is based on years of research and identifies a number of patterns and practices, which help identify the right mix of architectures, SDLC processes and team-of-teams design.
You cannot really copy the design of another organization and hope to achieve same or even better results. Team-of-teams designs matter in the context of the architecture they are implementing and the SDLC processes they use to do that.
Discovery Session
The Discovery Session helps us understand better the context, the different parameters of the scope and establish an approach with a timeframe and budget associated to them. We aim to fix all of this in order to allow our team to focus on the job at hand - accelerating the flow of value in your organization.
The session takes 2-3 hours. It takes some preparation, from choosing the focus and context of the engagement to preparing materials to help us understand better the challenge/s and existing architecture and team-of-teams design.
We typically need 2-3 days, after the Discovery Session, to finalize the approach and budget estimate. Within maximum a week after the session we can get on a call to review and discuss the approach and proposal.
Our Principles - Reducing Risks & Focus on Tangible Impact
Our purpose is enable as many leaders and their teams to leverage the Team Topologies approach, in order for them to deliver tangible positive impact on their business by creating an engaging, humane environment for their people.
1. De-risking transformations & transitions - transformations carry risks. The Team Topologies approach is designed with focus on decreasing the key risks while increasing the pace of change and value creation.
2. Actionable Insights - which can be put in practice without delays rather than grand statements and ambiguous recommendations. The Team Topologies approach was born on the back of years of research of practices of what drives success.
3. Target Outcomes Focus - our engagements are outcome-driven and we define the target outcomes together with you in the context of what is strategically important for you. A report is an output. The impact of applying the recommendations from the report is the outcome.
4. Accelerating Value & Impact - the world keeps moving and technology evolution is only accelerating. There is no time for grand designs with delayed impact. Our iterative approach assures fast value creation and tangible impact sooner (safer and happier - yes we love Jon Smart and his team and frequently work together).
5. Holistic Approach Based on the 3 Cornerstones for Fast Flow of Value - fast flow of value requires a holistic approach and balanced intervention across all 3 cornerstones for fast flow of value - (1) decoupled architecture, (2) SDLC processes, (3) team-of-teams design.
6. Independence & Sustainable Results - the strategy, its execution and change are yours. You own those and we are just the catalyst. We focus on working ourselves out of a job as soon as possible. This allows your fully enabled and capable team to continue to drive the new approach in a sustainable and scalable way -without us, so that we can help others too.
7. We do it with you, not for you - Good results require deep understanding of the industry and the organization.
It is faster and easier (and see the previous principle around sustainability of results) for us to enable your team and coach them on the job to apply the Team Topologies approach to your context, rather than for us to gain deep insights into your context.
Testimonials
“The content and focus of each session was extremely good, enabling us to take a really deep dive into different aspects of Team Topologies and explore each in depth.
The online format works really well, and the addition of the chat is great - with lots of good questions asked and answered, links to extra resources, and attendees relating their own experiences.
The exercises were interesting, and sometimes surprisingly challenging, but very useful in getting us thinking about how to apply the ideas of Team Topologies in practical ways.”
“I attended the Principles and Practices for Modern Platforms session which was based on the book Team Topologies and rich in content. The session provided many tips and techniques on how to increase the effectiveness of a platform team by improving developer experience (DevEx) and delivering real value to the company. Highly recommended!”