Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow – Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
You can think of team topologies like the elements needed for creating and maintaining a garden.
The team topologies approach acts like the instructions for placing the flowers and plants, along with patterns for pruning and training, whereas the cultural engineering and financial elements are like the soil, water, and fertilizer that help the plants grow healthily.
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The Big Ideas
- Use the “inverse Conway maneuver, whereby an organization focuses on organizing team structures to match the architecture they want the system to exhibit rather than expecting teams to follow a mandated architecture design.
- Minimize extraneous team cognitive load so that teams can focus on the work that really matters.
- The four-team topologies, interaction modes (see image below), and effective software boundaries will help improve the flow of value.
Modern organisation design…. is about designing for collaborative technologies for the voice of the customer
Kinds of organizational structures
The combination of well-defined teams and well-defined interaction modes provides a powerful and flexible organizational capability for structural adaptation to change in external and internal conditions, enabling the organization to sense its environment, modify its activities, and focus to fit.
Three organisational structures in every organisation:
- The formal structure – facilitates compliance
- Informal structure – the realm of influence between individuals
- Value creation structure – how work actually gets done based on interpersonal relationships and reputation.
Designing Organizations
Five rules of thumb for designing organisations:
- Design when there is a compelling reason
- Develop options for deciding on a design
- Choose the right time to design
- Look for clues that things are out of alignment.
- Stay alert to the future.
Given our skills constraints, cultural and engineering maturity desired software architecture and business goals, which team topology will help us deliver results faster and safer?
