Organizations worldwide are crippled by slow flow, tangled delivery, and teams waiting on other teams. The cost is $billions per year.
📢 I am thrilled to offer an expert checkup on your adoption of Team Topologies directly with me.
The 2x 3-hour online review session covers all aspects of success factors for adoption of Team Topologies based on over 20 years of leadership, consulting, and practitioner insights.
It feels that stream-aligned teams and the fluid teams is a big conflict? And I'm wondering what kind of tradeoffs you've found when working with one or the other?
For example, how do devs build deep domain expertise in fluid teams?
Or if you do TeamToplogies, does it always mean that you might need to rework your architecture so teams can work on value and not just on individual components?
@tcoopman I listened to a podcast on FaST recently and it was super illuminating. FaST is essentially trying to optimize for developer engagement, not continuous care of services.
Published: A Cost-Savings Case for Team Topologies
Recently, I was involved in an unusual technology due diligence. We were asked how the technology organisation can save on costs. After some analysis and many interviews, we suggested a Team Topologies approach to organising teams that came with an impressive estimated cost reduction.
📢 I have decided to make the core operation of Team Topologies non-profit. TT authors Manuel Pais and I are committed to the core mission : "...to make work more humane and more effective for everyone ..." and means I will not be able to profit personally from core TT activities. 💵🚫
More details over the coming weeks as changes happen...
I've got exciting news! 🤩 I’m developing an online course on "Effectively Manage Team Cognitive Load." Targeted at managers, senior managers, executives, agile coaches, and software architects. Or anyone responsible to shape org structures, processes or software.
Want to lead a more humane and effective organisation?🎙️Tune in, to the latest alphalist #Podcast featuring Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies and show host Tobias Schlottke.
Here's what you'll discover:
🌊 Value Flow
🪢 Team Topologies
🛡️ Continuous Stewardship
🧩 Decoupling in Time
Apply these principles to foster adaptive flow-based approaches and solve hard problems with ease.
In his review of Refactoring Databases 18 years ago, @mfowler wrote: "After my refactoring book appeared I was delighted to find sophisticated tools appear with automated many refactoring tasks. I hope the same thing happens with databases, and we begin to see vendors offer tools that make continual migrations of schema and data easier for everyone."
Would be great to get a "state of the art" in 2024 on that. What tools have you used? How did you find using them?
@JeffGrigg@jasongorman@paladin@mfowler all this discussion about "how can we be sure that this SQL applies to a specific database or table?" is another argument in favour of strong ownership/stewardship of services and data.
If a single team (or group) is the only one making changes, then they already know which SQL applies where within their area of stewardship.
No need to hunt around for usage: the team already knows because their services are team-sized.
"The authors also show that the individual productivity improvements stagnate with increasing group size - in other words, above a specific team size (and it is rather small, approx. 10-15 people) almost no additional productivity gains can be observed."
"Team Topologies surfaces ever-changing team dynamics that allow us to have conversations. ... These lenses can be used to look at a collection of teams and figure out how well enabled they are for both of these, as well as the reasoning for how fast-flowing or cognitively heavy they are. With that reasoning, we can discover actions to take that will create faster, healthier groups." -- Brian Graham
💡 Me: "the extent to which the TT team interaction modes are included and understood in other approaches (SAFe, unFIX, etc.) is a reliable indicator of the readiness of that approach to deal with true complexity in organisation dynamics."
Team interactions are key for navigating complexity.
"... just four team types and three modes of interaction can help us model an organization that is optimized for flow of value.
But we must understand that what Team Topologies gives us is a pattern language and not a framework that can be applied unchanged. Patterns always need to be applied specifically for a given context and they provide the needed flexibility. "