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.
Example behaviors:
Stream-aligned teams have minimal hand-offs of work to other teams. Teams that are not cross-disciplined will struggle with handoffs. Bottlenecks and constraints will develop reducing flow. Another source of handoffs is silo’ed functionalities. Functional and technical silos are common in both business and technical organizations. Matrix management is a sign that silos still exist. A course of action will include developing cross-disciplined teams, value streams (or a similar approach), and understanding cognitive load. That is a ton of work. Teams can experiment and start the handoff discussion simply. Develop an interface matrix for a team and then use the data to explore how you can minimize interfaces and handoffs. Use a retrospective approach to involve the whole team in the discussion.
Enabling teams “proactively” seek to understand the needs of stream-aligned teams. The goal of enabling teams is to enhance the flow of value delivered by stream-aligned teams. The authors invoke the metaphor of servant leadership to describe the behavior of enabling teams. Enhancing stream-aligned teams’ ability to deliver value calls for close collaboration and communication. When I worked as an agile coach at Hyland Software I was a member of the “Agile Enablement” group (AE). AE was a set of enabling teams. One of AE group’s behaviors was creating an environment of continuous learning. We worked hard to enhance both our team and the teams we worked with.
Complicated-subsystem teams need close coordination AND collaboration with the stream-aligned they work with. Complicated-subsystem teams are generally part of specific applications and products. A critical part of the coordination includes work intake, what work to do, and when to do it. When this type of team is not aligned with the stream-aligned team they are related to they become bottlenecks.
Platform teams provide the substrate for stream-aligned teams to build up. Again strong coordination with stream-aligned teams is an important behavior. Another measure of whether a team is a platform team is the amount of effort to package their service and make those services usable.
Chapter Five provides a deep dive into the four core team topologies. Using the definitions and lists of expected behaviors have turned this chapter into a field guide.
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
Week 5: Static Team Topologies – https://bit.ly/40Q6eF2
Week 6: The Four Fundamental Team Topologies (Part 1) – https://bit.ly/3VUI7EB
