Untangling software delivery with Team Topologies, flow metrics, careful decoupling, and Adapt Together™️

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 (Accelerate/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.

Decoupling for flow is complimented by diffusion of knowledge for alignment and engagement using Adapt Together™️. Adapt Together™️ encourages and promotes flow-centric, humane, team-based ways of working that increase operational efficiency and staff engagement, leading to elevated customer and business outcomes.

Devised by the visionary leader in holistic innovation, Matthew Skelton - co-author of the award-winning book Team Topologies - together with insights and experience from colleagues and peers across multiple industries, Adapt Together™️ is an engaging, actionable way to produce lasting results in knowledge-work for bold, innovative organizations.

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From a talk given at Agile Yorkshire meetup on 04 September 2024 | Talk K28

Transcript

1. Untangling software delivery with Team Topologies, flow metrics, careful decoupling, and Adapt Together™ Matthew Skelton, Conflux - co-author of Team Topologies Agile Yorkshire meetup | 04 September 2024 K28
2. 2 flow
3. 3 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
4. Decoupling of teams & technology for fast flow Diffusing of ideas for learning and alignment 4
5. 5 Matthew Skelton holistic innovation Originator of Adapt Together™ by Conflux Co-author of Team Topologies matthewskelton.com
6. 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 6
8. 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. 8
9. 9 Continuously ‘untangle’ business concepts
10. 10 Find and adjust team & system boundaries for flow
11. 11 Minimize hand-offs
12. 12 Avoid blocking dependencies
13. 13 Move some decision-making to teams
14. 14 Team Topologies exposes any lack of clarity in purpose, conflict in priorities, or misalignment of incentives
16. The cost of tangled software DORA metrics & TT to the rescue! Real examples of detangling How to detangle with metrics & TT 16
17. The cost of tangled software 17
18. 18 If each engineer in the organization is blocked for 1 hour per working day, how much does this cost?
19. 19 • Fully-loaded cost: €160k per year • 260 paid days per year • Total of 400 engineers
20. 20 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 💥
21. Untangling ≃ Decoupling 21
22. Decoupling: separating things that do not need to be together 22
24. Decoupling enables shorter time-to-value 24
25. Decoupling enables multiple, independent flows of change, each with its own cadence 25
26. 26 Multiple, independent flows
27. 27 Multiple, independent flows, fractally
28. Decoupling of teams & technology for fast flow Diffusing of ideas for learning and alignment 28
29. Decoupling: teams, software, technology, deployments, data, business concepts, ... 29
30. Diffusing: principles, practices, learning, techniques, approaches, ... 30
31. Sidenote: Decoupling for reliability 33
32. Decoupling reduces the number of ways the software can fail (failure modes) 34
33. Decoupling helps to prevent cascading failure (W → X → Y → Z) 35
34. Decoupling helps contain the “blast” when errors occur 36
36. 38 Blast contained! 38
37. Accelerate metrics & Team Topologies to the rescue! 39
38. 🔍 Use the 4 Key Metrics from Accelerate and add “blocker count” 40
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/ 41
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 45
44. Measure ‘wait time’? https://www.isixsigma.com/methodology/lean-methodology/identify-constraints-and-reduce-wait-time-processes/ 46
45. Measuring ‘wait time’ is hard Count the number of blocking waits as a proxy ✨ 47
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 48
47. Use 4 key metrics 📊 + “blocker count” to assess and find better service & team boundaries for flow 49
48. “If we adjusted the service & team boundary here, would it improve the 4 key metrics?” 💓 50
49. “If we adjusted the service & team boundary here, reduce the blocker count?” 📉 51
50. Techniques from the Team Topologies community 52
51. 53 Independent Service Heuristics (ISH)
52. 54 “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. 55 User Needs Mapping (UNM)
54. 56 “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. 57 Team Interaction Modeling (TIM)
56. 58 “[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 59
58. Case Study JP Morgan 60
59. Case Study “How JP Morgan Applied Team Topologies to Improve Flow in a Market Leading Enterprise Platform” 61 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=y3OL7dv2l48 Fast Flow Conf 💖 https://www.fastflowconf.com/
60. Case Study 62
61. Case Study “60% of dependencies reduced through better team design” 💥 63
62. 64 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 65
64. • Financial advice • Founded 2009 • Consumers & companies • 'Explainable AI' • Increasingly successful 66
65. < 2019: growth x 6 67
66. Mid-2019 HALT! 68
67. September 2019 69
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. 70
69. 2020: New arch 71
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 72
71. Concepts • Stream-aligned: build & run • Boundaries that help flow • Supporting team types: reduce cognitive load on Stream teams 73
72. Results • Clear patterns and language • Framework for design decisions • Confidence in scaling approach 74 https://medium.com/ww-engineering/to-monolith-or-to-microservice-f8c3f967e63c
73. Thanks to: Richard Marshall CTO, Wealth Wizards (to 2021) 75 Further details: https://teamtopologies.com/wealthwizards
74. 76 organize for fast flow of value We help product, technology and engineering leaders design high-impact team-of-teams organizations. teamtopologies.com
75. How to detangle with metrics & Team Topologies 77
76. 🔍 Track dependencies and separate as “blocking” vs “non-blocking” 78
77. ⏳ ⏳ Blocking Non- Blocking 79
78. 🔍 Use tools like CodeScene to detect hidden coupling 80 80
79. 81 “Measure how well your organization aligns with your architecture” 💥 https://codescene.com/
80. 🔍 Use the Team Dependencies Tracking tool on GitHub 82 82
81. https://github.com/TeamTopologies/ Team-Dependencies-Tracking Team Dependencies Tracking CC BY-SA Inspired by details from Spotify 83
82. Use team dependencies tracking to find and remove dependencies that hurt flow 84
83. Case Study GOV.UK Home Office 86
84. Case Study “How the Home Office’s Immigration Technology department reduced its cloud costs by 40%” 87 https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/how- the-home-offices-immigration-technology-departm ent-reduced-its-cloud-costs-by-40
85. 88 https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/how-the-home-offices-immigration-technology-department-reduced-its-cloud-costs-by-40
86. Case Study Making service owners accountable for the $ spend for their service helps to clarify service boundaries 💡 89
87. Use cost metrics as a “financial scalpel” 🔪 to split services apart for fast flow 90
88. BUT … 91
89. If we have clear boundaries for flow, with limited interactions, how do we create alignment? How do we learn from each other at pace? 92
90. 93 Multiple, independent flows, fractally
91. 94 Multiple, independent flows, fractally
92. 95 Active diffusion of knowledge across team boundaries
93. 96 Alignment and engagement “High performers favor strategies that create community structures at both low and high levels in the organization...”
94. 97 internal conferences guilds Communities of Practice lunch & learn public blogs
95. 98 https://internaltechconf.com/ Internal Tech Conferences Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton
96. 99 “This initiative around internal conferences has been the single most effective thing to align business and technology that I have seen in this organization” – Murray Hennessey, CEO, (UK retail co)
97. 100 https://internaltechconf.com/ Internal Tech Conferences Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton It’s co pli ate !
98. 101 “The way that the Conflux crew used their active knowledge diffusion approach to seek out and champion good practices was a real revelation to us at TELUS and helped to shift thinking around how we innovate and share successes.” – Steven Tannock, Director, Architecture (Platform Technology & Tools) at TELUS Digital
99. 102 Thriving organizations, delivering at speed™ Create alignment, trust, and engagement across your organization whilst delivering at pace with fast flow. adapttogether.info
100. The cost of tangled software DORA metrics & TT to the rescue! Real examples of detangling How to detangle with metrics & TT 103
101. 104 “You too can save €x million per year by decoupling for fast flow”
102. 105 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
103. Decoupling of teams & technology for fast flow Diffusing of ideas for learning and alignment 106
104. Decoupling: teams, software, technology, deployments, data, business concepts, ... 107
105. Diffusing: principles, practices, learning, techniques, approaches, ... 108
106. 109 The Adapt Together™ approach from Conflux creates alignment, trust, and engagement across your organization whilst delivering at pace with fast flow. adapttogether.info 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. teamtopologies.com Copyright (c) 2017-2024 Conflux group of companies, Team Topologies Ltd, and Holistic Innovation Ltd. All Rights Reserved. The name “Conflux” and the filled C device are Registered Trademarks ® in multiple jurisdictions. The Team Topologies logo is a Registered Trademark ® in multiple jurisdictions.