Beyond Agile with Team Topologies

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Beyond Agile with
Team Topologies
Don’t just “do” Agile, be agile
Richard Allen

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Richard Allen
Head of consulting at Conjurer Solutions
Founder of leavewizard.com
Founder of devsouthcoast.com
Experience:
• More than 20 years developing software
Team Topologies Experience:
• Involved with one of the first implementations at
PureGym
• Further developed the Team-Shape-Templates
• Crafted the infographics
• Developed and delivered guided discovery workshops

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[poll: What does it mean to be Agile?]

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Individuals and interactions over processes and
tools
Working software over comprehensive
documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Agile Manifesto 2001

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[poll: What does it mean to be agile?]

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agile [ aj-uhl, -ahyl ]
quick and well-coordinated in movement
:an agile leap.
dictionary.com

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[poll: Can you name something that is agile?]

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https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a6781/how-microscopic-hairs-make-bats-agile-aviators/

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What do bats and humans have
in common?

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Sense!
Feel!
Organisms that evolve!

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18 Years Later…
September 2019, IT Revolution Press

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“We must shift our thinking from treating teams as collections of
interchangeable individuals that will succeed as long as they
follow the “right” process and use the “right” tools, to
treating people and technology as a single human/computer
carbon/silicon socio-technical ecosystem”
Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

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Aim to achieve business agility via:
• Rapid flows of change and fast feedback
• High situational awareness
• Loosely coupled, autonomous teams
• Loosely-coupled, autonomous services & applications (architecture)
• High domain context at multiple levels
• Healthy, evolvable codebase
• Engaged Teams
• People incentivised for long-term product health, not “features”

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Team-first: the Agile of organization design?

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Team-first Thinking
TEAM SIZE
TEAM LIFESPAN TEAM
INTERACTIONS
TEAM
COGNITION

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Team Lifespan: Small long-lived teams
TEAM =
• Stable (not static) group of 5 to 9 people
• Work towards a shared goal as a unit
• Smallest entity of delivery within an
organization

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Team Lifespan: Dynamic Reteaming

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Team Size: Dunbar’s Number
Trust dynamics can
change when crossing a
Dunbar boundary.
Expect different rules &
non-linear effects

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Team Interactions: Conway’s Law
“Organizations which design systems…are
constrained to produce designs which are copies
of the communication structures of these
organizations”
- Mel Conway

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Team Interactions: Inverse Conway Manoeuvre
“change your team structure to
get a loosely coupled
architecture”

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Team Interactions: Dependencies
Blocking
Non-Blocking

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Team Cognition: Cognitive Load
“Software that fits in your head”
- Daniel Terhorst-North

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“Cognitive load is the total amount
of mental effort being used in the
working memory”
- John Sweller

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Intrinsic (skills)
Extraneous: (mechanism)
Germane: (domain focus)

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(Intrinsic)
] Extraneous [
Germane

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Team Cognition: Business Domains
Cynefin Framework, Dave Snowden

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Team Cognition: Fracture Planes
Business Domain Bounded Context
Regulatory Compliance
Change Cadence
Team Location
Risk
Performance Isolation
Technology
User Personas

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Four Fundamental Team Types
Stream-aligned team
Platform team
Enabling
team
Complicated
Subsystem
team

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Stream-aligned teams
Stream-aligned team
Platform team
Enabling
team
Complicated
Subsystem
team

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Enabling teams
Stream-aligned team
Platform team
Enabling
team
Complicated
Subsystem
team

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Complicated Subsystem teams
Stream-aligned team
Platform team
Enabling
team
Complicated
Subsystem
team

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Platform teams
Stream-aligned team
Platform team
Enabling
team
Complicated
Subsystem
team

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Interaction Modes
Collaboration
XaaS
Facilitating

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Collaboration
Collaboration
XaaS
Facilitating

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X-as-a-Service
Collaboration
XaaS
Facilitating

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Facilitation
Collaboration
XaaS
Facilitating

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Typical Team Interaction Modes
Collaboration X-as-a-Service Facilitation
Stream-aligned Typical Typical Occasional
Enabling Occasional Typical
Complicated-subsystem Occasional Typical
Platform Occasional Typical

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Team Interaction Patterns
Complicated
Subsystem
team
Stream-aligned
Stream-aligned
Platform team
Enabling
team
Flow of change

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Differences from the book
Complicated
Subsystem
team
Stream-aligned
Stream-aligned
Platform team
Enabling
team
https://github.com/TeamTopologies/Team-Shape-Templates

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Becoming a “sensing” organization

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Listening for awkward interactions

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Organizational Sensing for Evolution
Stream-aligned team
Flow of change
LIVE
Rapid
Feedback

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“Team Topologies: The domain
specific language
(DSL) of organization design”

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•Launched 2009
•260+ gyms in the UK
•> 1.1 million members
•Largest operator in the UK
•Second largest operator in
Europe
•2015-2020 Huge growth in
members

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Modern Software Delivery Practices
Continuous
Delivery
Continuous Integration
8 Deployments per day
Scrum

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Steady Growth with Short-lived Project Teams
Project D
Project E Small Changes
Project F
Projects BAU
Project G
Project H
Bugs
GSD
Handover

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Trigger: Rapid Team Growth to 40+
Bugs & Small Change
Project G
Project H
Project I
Project J
Project K
Projects BAU
GSD
Handover

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The Monolith
Site
Project G
Project H
Project I
Project J
BAU
Vendor API
Reseller API
Mobile App
Mobile Team
Customer API
Membership Management System
Single repository

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“Short-lived project teams with
handovers to BAU teams is not
scalable, how can we change this?”

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Breaking the Monolith
Gyms
Site
Class Listings Members Area
Payments Help Centre Class Booking
Join Process
PT Profiles
Gift Cards
Landing Pages
Project G
Project H
Project I
Project J
BAU
Group
Training
Time Tables
Blog Live Chat Kiosks …

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Other
Payments Retention
Acquisition Team
Gym Team
Re-defining Teams
Join Process
Landing Pages
…
Time Tables
Gyms
…
Reconcilliation
Join Payments
…
Members Areaa
CRM
…
…
Streams
Enabling
Mobile?
Platform
Membership Management Gateway (MMG)
Developer Experience SRE

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Gym Team
Payments
Retention
Acquisition Team
Mobile?
MMG
DevEx SRE
High Collaboration Phase

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Mobile?
Using Facilitation and Developing X as a Service
Gym
Retention
Acquisition
Membership Management Gateway
SRE
Payments
Dev
Ex
*
*
*
*
*
*
Flow of change

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Mobile?
Gym
Retention
Acquisition
Continuous Collaboration and Facilitation
SRE
Payments
Dev
Ex
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Flow of change

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Simple Team APIs
Team Type: Acquisition
Owns a prospects journey before they have joined.
Responsibilities:
Join Process Steps 1 to 3
Gym Pages and Reviews
Banner management
Resellers
Team Presence:
Tech Lead: Joe Bloggs
Product Owner: Jeremy Clarkson
Business Analyst: Don Johnson
Jira Board: https://ajiraboard.com
Jira Label: team-acquisition
Members:
Joe Bloggs
Frankie Boyle
Clare Balding

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Gym
Acquisition
Retention
DevEx/SRE
Communities of Practice (Chapters)
Front End CMS and
Content
DevOps Security Tech
Leads

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“Team Topologies helped us to evaluate the
relationships between our teams and
business strategy, to increase team efficiency,
and evolve away from a monolith”
John Kilmister
Principal Software Architect, PureGym

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Key Concepts
‘Fracture Planes’ for splitting code
Cognitive Load for boundaries
Interaction Modes for clarity
Team Types for purpose

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Results
Projects + BAU -> Streams
Separation of services
More business-responsive

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Results
Balanced ownership of services
Improved team morale
Better long-term architecture

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Could Team Topologies help you?

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Disengaged Teams?
Pushing against
Conway’s Law?
Teams pulled in
many directions?
Flow is blocked?
Painful re-org every
few years?
Software too
big for teams?

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•Healthy organizational culture
•Good engineering practices
•Healthy funding and financial practices
•Avoid CapEx/OpEx split in IT
•Project driven deadlines
•Large-batch budgeting
•Clarity of business vision
Team Topologies may not be enough

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In a nutshell…
https://teamtopologies.com/infographics
https://teamtopologies.com/academy

Beyond Agile with Team Topologies

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