Business and technical agility with Team Topologies - QCon Plus - 2021-05-26

Organizations that do not adapt rapidly to the modern, highly-changeable business and technical environment are failing, and failing in large numbers. Increased regulation, pressures from climate change, shifting of energy sources, digitalization, cloud-native, and (recently) the COVID-19 pandemic are all driving a need for business and technical agility in organizations of all sizes.

In this talk, we’ll explore how the patterns and principles from Team Topologies promote true business and technical agility through a rapid flow of software change, fast feedback from running systems, a strong drive for loose coupling, and an awareness of sociotechnical mirroring. Combined with a product mindset and techniques from Domain-driven Design, the Team Topologies approach is helping organizations around the world to adapt to the “new normal” and achieve true business and technical agility.

From a talk at QCon Plus on 2021-05-26

Transcript

1. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Business and Technical Agility with Team Topologies Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais co-authors of Team Topologies @matthewpskelton @manupaisable QCon Plus - 26 May 2021
2. 2 Manuel Pais Independent IT organizational consultant and trainer Ex-dev, ex-build manager, ex-tester, ex-QA lead Twitter: @manupaisable LinkedIn: manuelpais Matthew Skelton Founder at Conflux Experience as: software developer, technical director, change enabler, conference organizer... Twitter: @matthewpskelton LinkedIn: matthewskelton
3. Team Topologies 3 Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press, 2019 teamtopologies.com/book
4. “innovative tools and concepts for structuring the next generation digital operating model” Charles T. Betz, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research 4
5. 5 What is business agility? Being agile, not doing ‘Agile’ Valuable: product mindset Team Topologies examples
6. How does Team Topologies help with business & technical agility? 6
7. Team Topologies encourages decoupling of business concepts to help make the organization more responsive
8. Team Topologies patterns help to turn blocking compliance checks into self-service, flow-aligned, API-driven checks
9. Team Topologies is partly a sense-making approach to help organizations gain situational awareness and therefore agility
10. Team Topologies helps the organization to focus tightly on its core mission via streams and limiting team cognitive load
11. 11 What is business agility? Being agile, not doing ‘Agile’ Valuable: product mindset Team Topologies examples
12. What is business agility? 12
13. Business Agility: the ability to respond rapidly* to changing internal and external conditions (* in hours)
14. 14 Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash Remote-first
15. 15 Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash Speed of change: technology, climate, geopolitical
16. 16 Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash Increased global and local competition
17. digital
18. “Digital”: 1 18 Rapidly-developed services accessed via personal compute devices
19. “Digital”: 2 19 Rich telemetry for existing processes provided via software and sensors
20. “Digital”: 3 20 Highly effective ways of working discovered & evolved through 1 and 2
21. Questions to answer How would we optimize for a fast flow of change?
22. Questions to answer How would we make sure we focus on user needs?
23. Questions to answer How would we produce the right thing in the right way at the right time?
24. Questions to answer How would we easily ‘course-correct’ when we need to adjust?
25. Questions to answer How would we maximize our chances of finding new opportunities for innovation?
26. 26 What is business agility? Being agile, not doing ‘Agile’ Valuable: product mindset Team Topologies examples
27. Being agile, not doing ‘Agile’
28. 28 State of DevOps reports 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Annual survey of 1000-5000 IT professionals worldwide using rigorous statistical methods
29. 29 State of DevOps 2019 Analysis from responses of over 31,000 IT professionals worldwide over 6 years “an independent view into the practices and capabilities that drive high performance” + “Four Key Metrics”
30. 32 State of DevOps 2019 Key technical practices • Lightweight change process • Real DR testing • Maintainable code • Loosely-coupled systems • Monitoring • Trunk-based development • Deployment automation
31. 34 4 key metrics: ‘Accelerate’ lead time deployment frequency Mean Time To Restore change fail percentage
32. 35 Fast feedback via deployment pipelines
33. 36 Good technical practices (TDD, …)
34. 37 Team ownership of software & services
35. 38 Configuration in version control (Git)
36. 39 Cloud-native: transparent in operation
37. 40 Cloud-native: designed for automation
38. 42 Re-aligned architecture
39. 44 Domain-driven design (DDD) Untangle business concepts for faster flow
40. 46 Wardley Maps Increase situational awareness and apply the right techniques - custom/product/utility
41. 48 Team Topologies Fast flow, rapid feedback, team interactions, org evolution, team cognitive load, ...
42. 49 Rapid flow of change
43. 50 Rapid feedback from running systems
44. 51 Handovers kill flow
48. 55 Flow of change
49. 🔍 Track dependencies and separate as “blocking” vs “non-blocking” 56
50. ⏳ ⏳ Blocking Non- Blocking
51. Remove barriers to flow: hand-offs, approval gates, manual inspections Replace with self-service APIs 58
52. ⚠ Compliance mindset shift: Permitting to Enabling 59
54. “What would be needed for us to be compliant with security/finance/PII rules with multiple, decoupled, rapid flows of change?” (Self-service APIs) Scaled Expertise 61
55. Compliance as Code (API) 62 Flow of change Domain experts as Enabling team for compliance / governance
56. 63 What is business agility? Being agile, not doing ‘Agile’ Valuable: product mindset Team Topologies examples
57. The value of a product mindset
58. Product = Holistic User Experience ➔ Functionality ➔ Design ➔ Monetization ➔ Content – Marty Cagan, 2010 65 Source: https://svpg.com/defining-product/
60. 67 A product is optional to use - no-one is forced to use the product
62. 69 A product is carefully designed and curated
64. 71 A product simplifies something for users
66. 73 A product evolves to take advantage of technology changes
67. A strong focus on user needs drives good software #UX
68. The software should ‘get out of the way’ - design for usability
69. ⚠ Product Management for internal platforms 76
71. 78 A platform is optional to use - no team is forced to use the platform
72. Platforms must advocate for their platform product and “market” it to internal teams (User Personas, UX, talking...) Internal Marketing 79
73. 80 A platform is a curated experience for engineers (the customers of the platform).
74. 81 What is business agility? Being agile, not doing ‘Agile’ Valuable: product mindset Team Topologies examples
75. Team Topologies examples
76. Case studies in the TT book 83
77. 84 ...
78. May 2021: 20 months since publication of TT Photo by noor Younis on Unsplash 85
79. Industry examples on the TT website 86
81. Organizations that Matthew and Manuel have worked with since 2019... 88
82. A large European banking group A major cloud technology company GOV: Brazil, Canada, Norway, UK, US Several major telecoms companies A scale-up in Open Banking An aerospace laboratory Healthcare providers Several mortgage companies 89
83. Case Study 90
84. • Founded 2005 • 70 stores in the UK • £260m revenue • 2500 employees • 2019: changes to make IT more responsive 91
85. High fragmentation of work and focus 92 Jan 2019
86. Identify boundaries - business domain 93 m id-2019
87. Combine with Wardley Mapping 97 Jan 2020
88. Adopt the Thinnest Viable Platform 99 Feb 2020 Static data fine to begin with: shops rarely move!
89. Clarity of purpose from team types 100 Feb 2020
90. Concepts • Stream-aligned (business domain) • Thinnest Viable Platform • Evolving teams and interactions • Combine with Wardley Mapping 101 teamtopologies.com/examples
91. Thanks to: Paul Martin IT Director, Footasylum Andy Norton Software Development Manager, Footasylum 104
92. Case Study 105
93. • UK's leading comparison and switching service • Founded in 2000 • ~250 staff, £140m+ revenue • > 2010: Autonomous teams • > 2017: Platformization 106
94. Autonomous stream-aligned teams 107 2015 ...
95. 108 Low-level AWS service calls before platform adoption 2015-2016: direct AWS API calls
96. 109 Low-level AWS service calls before platform adoption 2015-2016: direct AWS API calls 🤯
97. “people were spending more time having to interact with relatively low-level services thus spending their time on relatively low-value decisions” Paul Ingles, CTO at RVU / Uswitch 110
98. 112 2017 Early platform (first customer)
99. 114 Low-level AWS service calls since platform adoption 2015-2018: direct AWS API calls
100. 122 2020
101. infoq.com/articles/kubernetes-successful-adoption-foundation
102. “Engineering principles guided the way we organise teams: loosely-coupled and highly cohesive. Team Topologies is great for tying a lot of those ideas together, and most importantly giving it some language.“ Paul Ingles, CTO at RVU / Uswitch 127
103. Results • “Curated” platform experience • Reduced complexity for teams • Addressed cross-team needs 129
104. Results • From autonomy to self-sufficiency • Patterns applied beyond IT • Balancing fast flow with reliability 130 teamtopologies.com/examples
105. Thanks to: Paul Ingles Chief Technology Officer RVU / Uswitch Tom Booth Head of Infrastructure & Security RVU / Uswitch 131
107. 133 What is business agility? Being agile, not doing ‘Agile’ Valuable: product mindset Team Topologies examples
108. Respond rapidly to changing external and internal conditions
109. Situational awareness, clarity of business purpose, good technical practices, localised decisions
110. Strong focus on user needs and User Experience (UX), clear costs, viability, mission, ...
111. Real-world examples
112. How does Team Topologies help with business and technical agility? 138
113. Team Topologies encourages decoupling of business concepts to help make the organization more responsive
114. Team Topologies patterns help to turn blocking compliance checks into self-service, flow-aligned, API-driven checks
115. Team Topologies is partly a sense-making approach to help organizations gain situational awareness and therefore agility
116. Team Topologies helps the organization to focus tightly on its core mission via streams and limiting team cognitive load
117. What’s next? 143
118. Free Resources 145 teamtopologies.com/resources (links, slides, video) teamtopologies.com/tools (templates, assessments, etc)
119. Infographics • Getting Started • In a Nutshell 146 teamtopologies.com/infographics
120. academy.teamtopologies.com
121. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Team Topologies Partner Program 🤝 partners@teamtopologies.com
122. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Sign up for news and tips: TeamTopologies.com
123. 153 Manuel Pais FlowOnRails Twitter: @manupaisable LinkedIn: manuelpais Matthew Skelton Conflux Twitter: @matthewpskelton LinkedIn: matthewskelton Copyright © Conflux Digital Ltd and FlowOnRails 2018-2021. All rights reserved. teamtopologies.com