Untangling software delivery with Team Topologies, flow metrics, and careful decoupling - Conflux

The key predictive IT delivery metrics uncovered by the book Accelerate and the State of DevOps Reports - aka “DORA metrics” - point the way towards flow-centric operating models for every modern enterprise building and running software-enriched services. However, improving flow of value within an organization is often difficult due to cross-team dependencies and coupling: everything is tangled. In an organization with 700 software engineers, if 60% of the time is spent waiting on other teams - a typical industry flow efficiency - the financial penalty of dependencies and coupling is high. It is vital, therefore, to invest in decoupling and removing team dependencies - untangling - to enable value to flow better and more efficiently.

In this talk, Matthew Skelton - founder at Conflux and co-author of the book Team Topologies - explores techniques and metrics to help you untangle your software delivery, together with real-world examples of organizations successfully applying Team Topologies and related approaches to decouple teams and improve flow:

Independent Service Heuristics (ISH)
User Needs Mapping (UNM)
The 4 key metrics (DORA)
Flow efficiency and proxy measures

Increasingly, the ideas and patterns in Team Topologies (TT) are being applied worldwide not just in software/IT but increasingly in non-IT contexts like legal services, healthcare, education, and HR, resulting in quicker time-to-market and better ROI. These applications of TT point the way to an operating model for fast flow organizations.

Talk K28

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcayzfzRIvk&list=PLKK5zTDXqzFNt1OTjhlrCnhVl1UO2QMbk&index=18

Transcript

1. Untangling software delivery with Team Topologies, flow metrics, and careful decoupling Matthew Skelton, Conflux - co-author of Team Topologies DORA community Talk & Learn | 2023-08-24 K28
2. Photo goes here Matthew Skelton Founder at Conflux Co-author of Team Topologies LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/matthewskelton Mastodon: mastodon.social/@matthewskelton 2
3. Team Topologies Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press, September 2019 Order via stores worldwide: teamtopologies.com/book 3
5. Team Topologies is the leading approach to organizing business and technology teams for fast flow, providing a practical, step-by‑step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction. 5
6. 6 Continuously ‘untangle’ business concepts
7. 7 Find and adjust team & system boundaries for flow
8. 8 Minimize hand-offs
9. 9 Avoid blocking dependencies
10. 10 Move some decision-making to teams
11. 11 Team Topologies exposes any lack of clarity in purpose, conflict in priorities, or misalignment of incentives
13. The cost of tangled software DORA metrics & TT to the rescue! Real examples of detangling How to detangle with metrics & TT 13
14. 14 flow
15. 15 Use balanced health metrics (DORA, flow, cost, blockers, etc.) + TT techniques (TIM, ISH, UNM) to help find good boundaries for fast flow by untangling (decoupling) separate services
16. The cost of tangled software 16
17. 17 If each engineer in the organization is blocked for 1 hour per working day, how much does this cost?
18. 18 • Fully-loaded cost: €160k per year • 260 paid days per year • Total of 400 engineers
19. 19 Engineer fully weighted cost per year Engineer cost per day Hours blocked per 8-hour day Days blocked per 260-day year Cost of blockers per engineer per year Number of engineers Total cost of blockers per year €160,000.00 €615.38 1 32.5 €20,000.00 400 €8,000,000.00 €8 million per year 💥
20. Untangling ≃ Decoupling 20
21. Decoupling: separating things that do not need to be together 21
23. Decoupling enables shorter time-to-value 23
24. Decoupling enables multiple, independent flows of change, each with its own cadence 24
25. 25 Multiple, independent flows
26. Decoupling of teams & technology vs Mingling of ideas for learning 26
27. Decoupling: teams, software, technology, deployments, data, business concepts, ... 27
28. Mingling: principles, practices, learning, techniques, approaches, ... 28
29. Team autonomy is a means to an end: rapid flow of change 29
30. Instead of trying to measure “team autonomy” directly, prefer measures like rapid flow, rapid feedback, minimal blocking dependencies… 💡 30
31. Sidenote: Decoupling for reliability 31
32. Decoupling reduces the number of ways the software can fail (failure modes) 32
33. Decoupling helps to prevent cascading failure (W → X → Y → Z) 33
34. Decoupling helps contain the “blast” when errors occur 34
36. 36 Blast contained! 36
37. DORA metrics & Team Topologies to the rescue! 37
38. 🔍 Use the 4 Key Metrics from Accelerate and add “blocker count” 38
39. Accelerate Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim IT Revolution Press, 2018 Order via stores worldwide: https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/ 39
40. 4 key metrics: ‘Accelerate’ lead time deployment frequency Mean Time To Restore change fail percentage
41. 4 key metrics: ‘Accelerate’ lead time deployment frequency Mean Time To Restore change fail percentage Encourage fast flow
42. 4 key metrics: ‘Accelerate’ lead time deployment frequency Mean Time To Restore change fail percentage Encourage operability
43. What % of lead time is actual work? Example: 120 hours / (120+630) x 100 = 16% Flow Efficiency 43
44. Measure ‘wait time’? https://www.isixsigma.com/methodology/lean-methodology/identify-constraints-and-reduce-wait-time-processes/ 44
45. Measuring ‘wait time’ is hard Count the number of blocking waits as a proxy ✨ 45
46. 4 key metrics & ‘blocker count’ lead time deployment frequency Mean Time To Restore change fail percentage ‘blocker count’ as a proxy for flow efficiency 46
47. Use 4 key metrics 📊 + “blocker count” to assess and find better service & team boundaries for flow 47
48. “If we adjusted the service & team boundary here, would it improve the 4 key metrics?” 💓 48
49. “If we adjusted the service & team boundary here, reduce the blocker count?” 📉 49
50. Techniques from the Team Topologies community 50
51. 51 Independent Service Heuristics (ISH)
52. 52 “The Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) are rules-of-thumb (clues) for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product.” https://teamtopologies.com/ish
53. 53 User Needs Mapping (UNM)
54. 54 “User Needs Mapping attempts to capture the first 4 steps of the Wardley Mapping process … for identifying potential team [and service] boundary” https://teamtopologies.com/unm
55. 55 Team Interaction Modeling (TIM)
56. 56 “[Team Interaction Modeling helps] to describe how to re-organize … teams and their interactions to achieve better flow and deliver value faster.” https://teamtopologies.com/tim
57. Real examples of detangling for fast flow 57
58. Case Study JP Morgan 58
59. Case Study “How JP Morgan Applied Team Topologies to Improve Flow in a Market Leading Enterprise Platform” 59 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=y3OL7dv2l48 Fast Flow Conf 💖 https://www.fastflowconf.com/
60. Case Study 60
61. Case Study “60% of dependencies reduced through better team design” 💥 61
62. 62 Engineer fully weighted cost per year Engineer cost per day Hours blocked per 8-hour day Days blocked per 260-day year Cost of blockers per engineer per year Number of engineers Total cost of blockers per year €160,000.00 €615.38 1 32.5 €20,000.00 400 €8,000,000.00 €8 million per year 💥 Remember this? [Note: these are not figures from JP Morgan]
63. Case Study 63
64. • Financial advice • Founded 2009 • Consumers & companies • 'Explainable AI' • Increasingly successful 64
65. < 2019: growth x 6 65
66. Mid-2019 HALT! 66
67. September 2019 67
68. Independent Service Heuristics https://github.com/TeamTopologies/Independent-Service-Heuristics Rules-of-thumb for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product. 68
69. 2020: New arch 69
70. “Team Topologies ... has given us the tools we were looking for and have helped us to build a plan and have confidence that we know where we’re going and how to get there.” Richard Marshall, CTO, Wealth Wizards 70
71. Concepts • Stream-aligned: build & run • Boundaries that help flow • Supporting team types: reduce cognitive load on Stream teams 71
72. Results • Clear patterns and language • Framework for design decisions • Confidence in scaling approach 72 https://medium.com/ww-engineering/to-monolith-or-to-microservice-f8c3f967e63c
73. Thanks to: Richard Marshall CTO, Wealth Wizards (to 2021) 73 Further details: https://teamtopologies.com/wealthwizards
74. Case Study GOV.UK Home Office 74
75. Case Study “How the Home Office’s Immigration Technology department reduced its cloud costs by 40%” 75 https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/how- the-home-offices-immigration-technology-departm ent-reduced-its-cloud-costs-by-40
76. 76 https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/how-the-home-offices-immigration-technology-department-reduced-its-cloud-costs-by-40
77. Case Study Making service owners accountable for the $ spend for their service helps to clarify service boundaries 💡 77
78. Use cost metrics as a “financial scalpel” 🔪 to split services apart for fast flow 78
79. How to detangle with metrics & Team Topologies 79
80. 🔍 Track dependencies and separate as “blocking” vs “non-blocking” 80
81. ⏳ ⏳ Blocking Non- Blocking 81
82. 🔍 Use tools like CodeScene to detect hidden coupling 82 82
83. 83 “Measure how well your organization aligns with your architecture” 💥 https://codescene.com/
84. 🔍 Use the Team Dependencies Tracking tool on GitHub 84 84
85. https://github.com/TeamTopologies/ Team-Dependencies-Tracking Team Dependencies Tracking CC BY-SA Inspired by details from Spotify 85
86. Use team dependencies tracking to find and remove dependencies that hurt flow 86
87. Team First Look at your organisation through the lens of teams, rather than just the people they work for. teamform.co 87
88. The cost of tangled software DORA metrics & TT to the rescue! Real examples of detangling How to detangle with metrics & TT 88
89. 89 “You too can save €8 million per year by decoupling for fast flow”
90. 90 Use balanced health metrics (DORA, flow, cost, blockers, etc.) + TT techniques (ISH, UNM, TIM) to help find good boundaries for fast flow by untangling (decoupling) separate services
91. 91 What’s your perspective? Which aspects resonate? Which things feel incorrect?
92. 92 expert-led group learning for adopting fast flow and Team Topologies confluxhq.com
93. thank you confluxhq.com Copyright (c) 2017-2023 Conflux group of companies. All Rights Reserved. The name “Conflux” and the filled C device are Registered Trademarks ® in multiple jurisdictions.