Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais, Ruth Malan (Foreword by)

Overview

"This book will help executives and business leaders focus on the key strategies of high performance teams to effectively address the needs of today and the evolving landscape of tomorrow.” —Barry O'Reilly, author of Unlearn and Lean EnterpriseCompanion book Remote Team Interactions Workbook now available! Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942788812
Publisher:	IT Revolution Press
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	114,237
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

MATTHEW SKELTON has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. Head of Consulting at Conflux, he specializes in Continuous Delivery, operability and organization design for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software. MANUEL PAIS is an organizational IT consultant and trainer focused on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating flow. Recognized by TechBeacon in 2019 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, he is also coauthor of the book Team Topologies. He helps organizations rethink their approach to software delivery, operations, and support via strategic assessments, practical workshops, and coaching.

Table of Contents

Figures & Tables x

Case Studies & Industry Examples xi

Foreword Ruth Malan xv

Preface xvii

Part I Teams as the Means of Delivery

Chapter 1 The Problem with Org Charts 3

Communication Structures of an Organization 4

Team Topologies: A New Way of Thinking about Teams 9

The Revival of Conway's Law 9

Cognitive Load and Bottlenecks 11

Summary: Rethink Team Structures, Purpose, and Interactions 13

Chapter 2 Conway's Law and Why It Matters 15

Understanding and Using Conway's Law 15

The Reverse Conway Maneuver 18

Software Architectures that Encourage Team-Scoped Flow 21

Organization Design Requires Technical Expertise 23

Restrict Unnecessary Communication 24

Beware: Naive Uses of Conway's Law 26

Summary: Conway's Law Is Critical for Efficient Team Design in Tech 29

Chapter 3 Team-First Thinking 31

Use Small, Long-Lived Teams as the Standard 32

Good Boundaries Minimize Cognitive Load 39

Design "Team APIs" and Facilitate Team Interactions 46

Warning: Engineering Practices Are Foundational 55

Summary: Limit Teams' Cognitive Load and Facilitate Team Interactions to Go Faster 56

Part II Team Topologies That Work For Flow

Chapter 4 Static Team Topologies 61

Team Anti-Patterns 62

Design for Flow of Change 63

DevOps and the DevOps Topologies 65

Successful Team Patterns 67

Considerations When Choosing a Topology 72

Use DevOps Topologies to Evolve the Organization 75

Summary: Adopt and Evolve Team Topologies that Match Your Current Context 77

Chapter 5 The Four Fundamental Team Topologies 79

Stream-Aligned Teams 81

Enabling Teams 86

Complicated-Subsystem Teams 91

Platform Teams 92

Avoid Team Silos in the Flow of Change 99

A Good Platform Is "Just Big Enough" 100

Convert Common Team Types to the Fundamental Team Topologies 104

Summary: Use Loosely Coupled, Modular Groups of Four Specific Team Types 109

Chapter 6 Choose Team-First Boundaries 111

A Team-First Approach to Software Responsibilities and Boundaries 112

Hidden Monoliths and Coupling 112

Software Boundaries or "Fracture Planes" 115

Real-World Example: Manufacturing 121

Summary: Choose Software Boundaries to Match Team Cognitive Load 123

Part III Evolving Team Interactions for Innovation and Rapid Delivery

Chapter 7 Team Interaction Modes 131

Well-Defined Interactions Are Key to Effective Teams 132

The Three Essential Team Interaction Modes 133

Team Behaviors for Each Interaction Mode 137

Choosing Suitable Team Interaction Modes 144

Choosing Basic Team Organization 146

Choose Team Interaction Modes to Reduce Uncertainty and Enhance Flow 149

Summary: Three Well-Defined Team Interaction Modes 151

Chapter 8 Evolve Team Structures with Organizational Sensing 153

How Much Collaboration Is Right for Each Team Interaction? 153

Accelerate Learning and Adoption of New Practices 155

Constant Evolution of Team Topologies 159

Combining Teams Topologies for Greater Effectiveness 164

Triggers for Evolution of Team Topologies 165

Self Steer Design and Development 170

Summary: Evolving Team Topologies 175

Conclusion: The Next-Generation Digital Operating Model 177

Four Team Types and Three Interaction Modes 178

Team-First Thinking: Cognitive Load, Team API, Team-Sized Architecture 179

Strategic Application of Conway's Law 180

Evolve Organization Design for Adaptability and Sensing 181

Team Topologies Alone Are Not Sufficient for IT Effectiveness 181

Next Steps: How to Get Started with Team Topologies 183

Glossary 187

Recommended Reading 189

References 191

Notes 203

Index 207

Acknowledgments 215

About the Authors 216

Editorial Reviews

I have found Matthew and Manuel’s work on patterns and language to be incredibly valuable in both shaping strategies to transform team contexts over time across our organization, as well as in helping business and technology leadership connect with the topics of flow and continuous delivery.

Richard James

Teams are the fundamental building block of organizations, how those teams work and the system they operate in are the difference between average and high performance. I believe this book is a deep well of information for how you can optimize your organization's system for your current context.

Jeremy Brown

Team Topologies makes for a fascinating read as it explores the symbiotic relationship between teams and the IT architecture they support. It goes beyond the common approach of static org charts or self-organizing chaos and shows how to evolve the people system and IT system together.

Mirco Hering

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais say ‘Team Topologies is meant to be a functional book’—and it is. It’s well constructed and signposted, based in sound thinking, and challenges readers to assume, like them, that an organization is a socio-technical system or ecosystem. From this assumption comes practical suggestions, no prescriptions, and skill in explaining an approach that provides for effective tech/human organization design. For anyone in the tech/organization design field, [Team Topologies is] well worth reading.

Dr. Naomi Stanford

Team Topologies informs and enriches our understanding of organizational architecture...it serves as a pragmatic guide whether forming teams and enabling them to meet their challenges or helping existing teams become more effective at responsive value delivery.

Ruth Malan

When your teams encounter friction and bottlenecks it can be tempting to throw more people, tooling, and process at the problem. Your solution likely lies in a new team topology. But what should that look like? Team Topologies provides a much-needed framework for evaluating and optimizing team organization for increased flow. Teams that have the right size, the right boundaries, and the right level of communication are poised to deliver value to the company and satisfaction to the team members. Team Topologies combines a methodical approach with real-world case studies to unlock the full potential of your tech teams.

Greg Burrell

DevOps is great, but how do real-world organizations actually structure themselves to do it? You can’t just put everyone on a single, silo-less team, all sitting together in one giant open-plan office and going out to lunch or playing foosball together. Team Topologies provides a practical set of templates for addressing the key DevOps question that other guides leave as an exercise for the student.

Jeff Sussna

I’ve long enjoyed learning from Matthew’s and Manuel’s work, and have been recommending their content to clients and peers for several years (in particular, DevOpsTopologies.com). It’s great to see that their wisdom for organizing teams has been collated into a single book, because as the cliché goes, the hard stuff when working in an organization is always in relation to the ‘soft’ skills (and people and teams). If you're looking for an analysis of the challenges with the traditional ways of working, and also some practical guidance on mitigation strategies (e.g., new interaction modes, reducing cognitive load, and creating appropriate ‘Team APIs’), then this is the book for you!

Daniel Bryant

"The high performing team is the core generator of value in the modern digital economy. But cultivating and scaling an adaptive ecosystem of such teams is a too-often elusive goal. In this book, Skelton and Pais provide innovative tools and concepts for structuring the next generation digital operating model. Recommended for CI's, enterprise architects, and digital product strategists worldwide."

Charles Betz

The Team Topologies book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is unique. It is going to have a big influence across tech companies. We need a structured and methodical approach to shaping teams for continuous delivery instead of copying a few Spotify rituals. This is the book.

Nick Tune

Team Topologies provides fresh insights on how to anticipate and adapt to market and technology changes. To survive, enterprises need to unlearn existing command and control structures and instead move authority to leaders with the best information to take action and respond. This book will help executives and business leaders focus on the key strategies of high performance teams to effectively address the needs of today and the evolving landscape of tomorrow.

Barry O'Reilly

DevOps Topologies is an outstanding resource for all technical leaders pushing for modern approaches to effective partnerships between Development and Operations. It goes beyond high level explanations of DevOps offering that there are many flavors that a company may choose to adopt based on a few factors including maturity, size and product landscape. At Condé Nast International, this resource was crucial in understanding our current DevOps state and in defining the vision for our aspirational DevOps operating model. We were able to navigate around the pitfalls and organizational anti-patterns as excellently described in the models. The models themselves proved extremely useful artifacts in aligning both stakeholders and teams directly involved. Lastly, I introduced a new function to the business which hadn’t existed before: Site Reliability Engineering. The DevOps Topologies resource was a primary resource in firstly convincing myself that we had matured and grown to a point to justify SRE, but also in articulating to the business stakeholders the strategy for our new DevOps model. I am extremely pleased that Matthew and Manuel are growing on the success of the DevOps Topologies website and turning their further learnings into the far-reaching Team Topologies book for organization design.

Crystal Hirschorn

There is nothing more fundamental to management than how you structure your organization and what behaviors you encourage. Despite this, few have attempted to catalog and analyze the organizational design patterns of IT organizations going through Digital, DevOps, and SRE transformations. Skelton and Pais have not only accepted this bold challenge, but they’ve also hit the mark by creating an indispensable and unique resource.

Damon Edwards