Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 9, Chapter 7, Team Interaction Modes

Part 3 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow,  integrates team interactions with the team topologies. In Chapter 7, Team Interaction Modes, the authors define three basic interaction patterns.  The three are:

1. Collaboration – working closely with other teams,
2. X-as-a-Service – providing or consuming a service with minimal interaction, and
3. Facilitating – helping another team clear impediments.

Each team probably uses multiple approaches, however, one is the most common. The team’s topology predicts its most common mode. For example, a stream-aligned team will generally collaborate with other stream-aligned teams. Alternatively, they will use the x-as-a- service mode with other teams they have transactional relationships with. For example, procuring software licenses would require interacting with procurement. Interaction modes change based on context.

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 8, Chapter 6, Choose Team-First Boundaries

The boundaries of teams are shaped by a huge number of pressures ranging from corporate politics and specialism to architectural structure. Inspecting the majority of team boundaries it would seem that boundaries are the outcome of a random walk because they reflect all of these pressures over time. The result is that poor team design impacts architecture and flow. It is rare to have the ability to design teams from day one or even to press the hard reboot button.

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 7, Chapter 5 The Four Fundamental Team Topologies (Part 2)

Chapter 5 Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is a powerhouse. This chapter lays out the four fundamental team topologies with examples. This week, let’s examine some of the behaviors that the four fundamental team topologies exhibit. Understanding how teams structured in this manner should behave will also be useful for understanding which team type delivers the most value to the organization in specific contexts./

If we focus on one or two of the expected behaviors from each team topologies so it will be easier to identify gaps. The gaps provide a way to express how change (or lack of change) to close the gap affects value delivery.

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 6, Chapter 5 The Four Fundamental Team Topologies (Part 1)

Chapter 5 Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is a powerhouse. This chapter lays out the four fundamental team topologies with examples. I read this chapter twice during my first read of the book and I read it twice this week. We will approach thinking through the re-read over two weeks. 

The four fundamental topologies are: 

1. Stream-aligned teams are aligned to a single “valuable set of work.” The stream-aligned team builds and delivers value independently and without handoff to other teams. These teams are cross-disciplined; they have the capabilities to get the job done.  
2. Enabling teams are specialists in specific capabilities that coach other teams so they can do their jobs more effectively. The authors point out that an enabling team help stream-aligned teams to be more autonomous.  Enablement teams should put themselves out of business by improving other teams. 
3. Complicated-subsystem team is a group that supports a piece of an application that requires specific specialty knowledge to change that piece of code. These teams are rare and should only be formed when the work can be dealt with inside a standard steam-aligned team.
4. Platform teams enable the stream-aligned team by maintaining services and structure the stream-aligned teams build on. The platform teams help to ensure the stream-aligned teams are autonomous. 

Now on my second time through Team Topologies, I find being able to recognize the four basic topologies easily in the real world opens up ideas for how to use the material later in the book. I have found a second read and some practice is useful when trying to identify the four basic topologies in the mess most organizations call team design. 

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 5, Chapter 4, Static Team Topologies

Look at the teams around you. Very, very few were deliberately designed. Two anti-patterns are common, teams formed on an ad-hoc basis and teams formed and reformed for projects – musical chairs. Ad hoc team formation is one of the reasons the pressures represented by Conway’s Law have such an impact. Again considering the teams you know, I am willing to bet that two of the common anti-patterns are present.

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 4, Chapter 3, Team First Thinking

Using teams to get work done in all walks of life is undeniable.  The concept of teams in business began in the 1920s or 30s (https://bit.ly/43Wu8RW). Whether the idea of “team” emerged a century ago or last week is less important. What is important is the knowledge that very little work happens without teams. Team-first thinking makes simple sense.  

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 3, Chapter 2, Conway’s Law and Why It Matters

Chapter 2 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is a deep dive into Conway’s Law both forward and backward (the reverse Conway). Conway’s Law states simply: the way people are organized influences software architecture. One of the common themes in agile and lean communities is that organizations need to organize to facilitate the flow of value to their customers. The movement can be encapsulated by the phrase “moving from projects to products.” Despite the hoopla, in 2023, silos are still the predominant organization structure. Any type of silo resists architecting software for end-to-end flow. Re-architecting to support moving toward a product perspective requires a Herculean force of will in organizations wedded to this form of structure.  

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 2, Chapter 1, The Problem With Org Charts

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais open Chapter 1 with a quote from Naomi Stafford, Guide to Organizational Design. The quote:

“Organizations should be viewed as complex and adaptive organizations rather than mechanistic and linear systems” 

Naomi Stafford

The quote set the tone for Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow. Chapter 1 is titled The Problem With Org Charts. In this chapter, the authors point out problems in how organizations describe and organize themselves. 

 

Team Topologies, Re-read Saturday, Week 1, Logistics and Front Matter

Today we begin the re-read of Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. The book contains front matter, including a foreword and preface (22 pages), 8 chapters, a conclusion (190 pages), and end matter (glossary, recommended reading, references, notes, index, acknowledgments, and about the authors).

 

Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching, Re-read Saturday, Week 20, Wrap-up

Today we complete the re-read of Extraordinary Badass. Tomorrow we will release our interview with Bob Galen, the primary author.

Extraordinary Badass Agile Coaching is my new go-to coaching reference. It will be the book I recommend to anyone playing a coaching role in an agile environment. As we know a wide variety of organizational roles such as team leads, Scrum Masters, managers, and of course agile coaches coach. Coaching is dynamic and complex. What would you expect? There are people involved. Bob and his co-authors provide the tools to help a coach go from meh to badass.