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SE Radio 646: Matthew Skelton on Team Topologies
Matthew Skelton joins host Giovanni Asproni to talk about team topologies—an approach to organizing teams for fast flow of value. The episode starts with a description of the underlying principles before exploring the approach in more detail. From there, they discuss when to consider implementing the approach; keys to a successful implementation; and some common mistakes to avoid. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Matthew Skelton joins host Giovanni Asproni to talk about team topologies—an approach to organizing teams for fast flow of value. The episode starts with a description of the underlying principles before exploring the approach in more detail. From there, they discuss when to consider implementing the approach; keys to a successful implementation; and some common mistakes to avoid. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Show Notes
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Articles and Resources
- Book: Team Topologies
- Book: The Programmer’s Brain
- Book: Dynamic Reteaming
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number.
Giovanni Asproni 00:00:18 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Giovanni Asproni, and today I will be discussing team topologies with Matthew Skelton. Matthew is a leader in modern organizational dynamics for fast flow drawing on team topologies and adapt together to support organizations with transformation towards a sustainable fast flow of value. He’s the co-author of the book, Team Topologies and CEO of Conflux and Team Topologies. Matthew, welcome to the Software Engineering Radio show. Is there anything I missed that you need to add?
Matthew Skelton 00:00:49 That all sounds good. It’s good to be here. Thanks Giovannie, it’s good to be talking to you again.
Giovanni Asproni 00:00:53 Yes, thank you for being here. Now well let’s start with team topologies. So the first question obviously has to be what is team topologies?
Matthew Skelton 00:01:03 Team topologies is, I think it’s fair to say, the leading approach to organizing for a fast flow-of-value team of teams; organizations is the focus and it came out of the IT space, but really it’s actually applicable to all knowledge work. So far this is what we found out about, we can explore this a little bit later, but because of the way in that team topologies book, it didn’t really zoom into particular technologies. It turns out that the approach is actually really suitable for thinking about all kinds of knowledge work, not just sort of software delivery and IT, but other things as well. So you could really see team topologies as an approach to knowledge work where we are using technology to enhance our capabilities as humans to do knowledge work really effectively at scale.
Giovanni Asproni 00:01:51 Okay. Now I know that the model is based on four team types and three interaction modes. Can you briefly describe them to us?
Matthew Skelton 00:02:00 Yeah, but I don’t think that’s the best place to start. So that’s how we talk about it in the book, but actually there’s a danger if you start with just types of team and interaction modes that people really take a very shallow reading of team topologies. They just see it in terms of structure, in terms of renaming some teams. So it’s actually important to go a step backwards and look at what’s behind the principles underneath team topologies. The principles really are, we’re trying to get to a position where we’ve got a fast flow value out towards the user and we are going to have multiple separate flows of value because we’re trying to go quickly. So we are deliberately decoupling these flows. We’re not trying to bring them all together and coordinate them. So some large-scale software delivery Agile frameworks try to coordinate everything together.
Matthew Skelton 00:02:43 But we’re deliberately de-coordinating in order to get fast flow, we need to be mindful of team size because we want to have high trust so we can go quickly. So then the size of the team is quite small, that’s involved. We take the team as the smallest unit of delivery, by the way. We don’t go down into individuals when we’re thinking about the roles and responsibilities. We need to think about a cognitive load or mental load on that team because they’re going to be building and running a service, a single kind of stream of value that’s useful to a user. They’re going to be building and running that thing on an ongoing basis. And to be able to look after something like that with all the different aspects that you need to think about in terms of building and running something, we’ve got to be mindful of the cognitive load that we’re placing people under because otherwise they, they just won’t be able to support it properly.
Matthew Skelton 00:03:27 We’ve got to think about the kind of system and organizational architectures that work really well for flow. We’re going to have multiple fast flows of value. Then there’s only a certain small number of kind of architectures that actually work well. We’ve got to be mindful of what’s called Conway’s Law, which is like a mirroring between the organizational communication pathways and the likely architecture that results from that. And this has been, it’s a tendency, it’s a kind of force that’s at play if you. We can’t choose to work against it, but it’s going to be more difficult if we work against that what’s called homomorphic force. So we’ve got to be mindful that that the shape of our organization communication pathways, is likely to influence the kind of systems that we end up building. We need to be mindful that any digital technology we introduced now is likely to be obsolete in five years, three years, 18 months. So the way in which we think about introducing technology and using technology needs to expect it to disappear within a very short space of time, which is quite extreme compared to how technology was used in previous decades.
Giovanni Asproni 00:04:25 So you are suggesting teams to actually plan for that as well, plan for the fact that technologies are going to change is one of the themes.
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