Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Maximum Efficiency: Exploring Team Topologies

Rogar: The book doesn't have much to say, so unnecessarily repetition, quotes from different authors from different books.

United Kingdom on Nov 21, 2023

Nilendu MisraNilendu Misra: You ship your org chart. Therefore, to fix shipping, fix your org first. This is often called the "Inverse Conway maneuver". Or, more verbosely, something like - "developing software is a socio-technical complex problem. We often naively focus on the technical part and only reactively look into the org part much later in the process. This should be turned around. Start with building the right org. In fact, the right org should be the very FIRST deliverable of a system architecture." All good, except there is no existing framework, empirical literature or large-scale study of "technical org design". That results in biased, reactive and unnecessarily nested, if not random, engineering orgs. To try to produce what we ought to, we lean into what we had in the past. That primarily results in huge communication overhead.

This book methodically shows how to think and act on org design. It lays out four primary org types - value stream- (say, feature teams), enabling-, 'Complicated Subsystem- (say, databases or network), and Platform teams. It also shares three interaction modes these teams could work with each other - Collaboration, X-as-a-service and Facilitating. The 4x3...

United States on Oct 31, 2023

Turco, K: Read many books on teaming, this one actually gives you a framework for how to form a system of teams to build a software system. Easy read, excellent content and illustrations.

United States on Sep 12, 2023

Placeholder: A lot of organisation are following convoys law this book will help you understand how is that working

India on May 20, 2023

Amazon Customer: An actionable framework that can actually be implemented. Beyond pure concepts.

Mexico on May 06, 2023

Jan Dziekan: In our ever-accelerating world, one of the fundamental qualities of a good system is its ability to change and adapt. This requirement applies both to companies wishing to keep pace with competitors as well as to the software supporting their business goals. Within the context of software systems, one of the best practices is to compose them of independent, goal-oriented components. If the architecture achieves the so-called “low coupling and high cohesion”, there is a good chance that new business requirements would result in quick changes in a single part of the system, as opposed to the lengthy, costly and error-prone releases which plague the mismanaged software. “Team Topologies” demonstrates that the pressure for adaptability should not only restructure the computer programs, but also - and maybe even more importantly - the IT departments creating them. In my opinion it is an excellent work showing that IT should be thought of holistically, not as separate parts of technical code and people’s organization.

The basic premise of the book - that the structure of software reflects the organization building it - is not new. Known as the “Conway’s law”, the...

United States on Jan 27, 2023

Miguel Mendez: I liked how the information was simple to digest and the many examples helped to understand how to put the concepts into practice. I like the whole idea of using communication patterns first instead of architecture. I'll be taking that away for sure

Canada on Nov 13, 2022

Stefan Fritz: Wie gestaltet man Team-Strukturen optimal und passt sie aktuellen Gegebenheiten an? Grundlage der Gedanken von Skelton und Pais sind die Erkenntnisse, die Conway bereits 1968 hatte: „Organisationen, die Systeme entwerfen, […] sind gezwungen, Entwürfe zu erstellen, die die Kommunikationsstrukturen dieser Organisationen abbilden.“

Das bedeutet konkret für die Software-Erstellung, dass die Teamorganisation und die angewendeten bzw. etablierten Kommunikationsstrukturen das Ergebnis bestimmen. Es ist anzunehmen, dass dieser Ansatz auch für andere technische Entwurfsprozesse wie in der Elektronik-Entwicklung oder dem IT-Betrieb (Managed Services) gilt.

Die Grundthese ist, dass man einen direkten Zusammenhang zwischen dem Produkt/Service und den Entwicklern/Ingenieuren herstellt, damit ein unmittelbarer Fluss und eine Rückkopplung entstehen kann. Das erinnert stark an die Paradigmen im agilen Setup. Bei diesen geht es darum, dass kleine Teams von 5 bis 10 Personen für konkrete Ergebnisse verantwortlich sind. Die These wird durch folgende, von Conway inspirierte Frage, noch weiter auf die Spitze gebracht: "Gibt es ein besseres Design oder eine bessere technische...

Germany on Jan 06, 2021