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.
The title of Chapter 4 is Static Team Topologies; one of the underlying messages in the chapter is that team topologies should not be static. However, not being static isn’t the same as being musical chairs.
The two concepts in Chapter 4 that collided with my real life during this read were the ideas of the “wall of confusion” and cross-functional teams. As I have noted, I am not convinced the concept of single-function siloed teams is a thing of the past. For example, I recently talked with a friend who is managing a team that works on Salesforce for a Finance department. For any work to go into production work has to start with a group of analysts (in the business) and then get tossed over the wall to the Salesforce developers. They in turn toss it over the wall to the Dev/Sec/Ops team who tosses it over the wall to QA (testing…) and then back to the analysts for user acceptance testing. Finally, the Dev/Sec/Ops group gets it back and implements the change. I was even more incredulous when he told me that he had made sure each one of his developers had the skills to backstop every other developer on his team. He stated he had a cross-functional team. I bought my friend a very boozy beer (Great Lakes Blackout Stout – yum) to help drown his sorrows.
If you have studied Lean even at a cursory level you know that handoffs introduce waste. That waste includes tasks that have important names like scheduling, prioritization, and analysis to name a few. All these items are important and required BECAUSE siloed organizations are not designed for flow. The many boundaries of responsibility mean that there are many transition points that will impede flow, generate friction, and introduce defects. The example above is the epitome of the “wall of confusion” pattern. This is not just my friend’s issue, any pattern with a name is not unique. Highlighting this issue elicits the “that is just the way it is” response that reflects organizational fatalism. The authors introduce the idea of a stream-aligned team that gathers the skills needed to deliver work to production. A stream-aligned team is what cross-functional means. Tossing work over the wall to another function is a sign that you do not have a cross-functional team. Cross-training everyone in a silo is not the same thing (not bad, but not the same thing).
Stream-aligned teams organize for flow. Combining the skills needed to get work delivered in a single unit avoids “walls-of-confusion.” Identifying and tracking dependencies is an approach to identifying opportunities to improve flow. Another is simply watching a team’s Kanban or Scrum board and identifying where work stops or goes on hold. Knowing where the walls are is importan, tbut that is where the hard part of organizing for flow begins.
Buy a copy and read along! – Team Topologies: Organizing Business And Technology Teams For Fast Flow
Previous Installments:
Week 1: Front Matter and Logistics – http://bit.ly/3nHGkW4
Week 2: The Problem With Org Charts – https://bit.ly/3zGGyQf
Week 3: Conway’s Law and Why It Matters – https://bit.ly/3muTVQE
Week 4: Team First Thinking – https://bit.ly/3H9xRSC
