Dependencies between teams are a reality in any organization, even when we try to minimize them. If we don’t track team dependencies in the first place, we will run into scheduling and prioritization problems that slow down the flow of delivery. To understand inter-team dependencies, the work being done by each team needs to be visible. Once we are able to track these dependencies, we can then look into promoting healthy dependencies and removing (or minimizing the impact of) slowing or blocking … [Read more...]
What Does an Organization Need in Order to Thrive in a Remote-First World?
A remote-first way of working requires a new mindset from organizations. This excerpt from the Remote Team Interactions Workbook by Team Topologies coauthors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais explores some of the techniques that can help organizations adopt an effective remote-first approach. Many organizations have found, to their dismay, that rolling out a new chat tool for staff working remotely does not magically make the organization remote-first. A viable remote-first approach needs more … [Read more...]
Announcing the Remote Team Interactions Workbook
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and beyond has ushered in a new remote-first world for IT along with most other departments in the business. But many organizations have struggled to catch up with new tooling and ways of working. While some companies have embraced this new reality—ditching their expensive downtown offices and telling staff they can work from home permanently—many more organizations are discovering for the first time that the physical office was covering up poorly defined teams and … [Read more...]
Get Started with Team Topologies in 8 Steps
Every organization begins their Team Topologies journey from a different place. While there are myriad ways to apply the practices and principles in Team Topologies, it can be useful to have a simple guide you or your managers can refer to as you begin mapping out your transformation. The authors of Team Topologies have created one possible path below, allowing you to easily share and communicate the process with members of your team and the wider company. (Also, if you haven't read the book … [Read more...]
Minimize Team Cognitive Load to Increase Flow
The team is the fundamental means of delivery at organizations. But organizations also need to ensure that the cognitive load on a team is not too high. A team working with software systems that require too high of a cognitive load cannot effectively own or safely evolve the software. In this post, we will identify ways in which the cognitive load on teams can be detected and limited in order to safely promote fast flow of change. First, let's look at how to measure cognitive load. Measure … [Read more...]
Team Cognitive Load
When we talk about cognitive load, it’s easy to understand that any one person has a limit on how much information they can hold in their brains at any given moment. The same happens for any one team by simply adding up all the team members’ cognitive capacities. What is Cognitive Load Cognitive load was characterized in 1988 by psychologist John Sweller as “the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory.” Sweller defines three different kinds of cognitive load: Intrinsic … [Read more...]
Conway’s Law: Critical for Efficient Team Design in Tech
This post on Conway's Law is adapted from Chapter 2 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. Conway's Law Conway’s law is critical to understanding the forces at play when organizing teams amidst the long-lasting, unattended impact they can have on our software systems, as the latter have become larger and more interconnected than ever before. But you might wonder if a law from 1968 about software architecture has stood the test of time. We’ve come a long … [Read more...]
The Problem with Org Charts
Adapted from Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. Technology workers are in a constant state of action: creating and updating systems at an unbelievable rate, and combining different types of technology to create a compelling user experience. Mobile applications; cloud-based services; web applications; and embedded, wearable, or industrial IoT devices all need to interoperate effectively to achieve the desired business … [Read more...]
Remote-First Team Interactions
Remote-first work has suddenly become the "new normal" for many companies around the world. There is plenty of advice out there on how individual teams can bond and work effectively remotely, but there is little that addresses remote interactions between different teams that need to collaborate remotely as part of the same value stream. Moving entire enterprises online can exacerbate pre-existing interaction problems, increase wait times, and slow delivery and even response to incidents. This … [Read more...]
Gene Kim Q&A with the Authors of Team Topologies
Gene: Every company loves an org chart, but why are they really so misleading Matthew and Manuel: Org charts are management-focused constructs, meant to funnel lines of reporting from the bottom to the top—the typical hierarchical pyramid. The fundamental problem is extrapolating this construct and assuming it actually represents the lines of communication in the organization, alignment of business goals and decision making power. This misinterpretation still happens in most … [Read more...]
