TeamTopologies.com
@TeamTopologies
Using Enabling teams to
enhance flow and diffuse
practices at scale
Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies
DDD and Agile PM Group - Melbourne | 2024-06-04
Talk 46
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Matthew Skelton
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Co-author of the book Team Topologies
Founder at Conflux
“Ecosystem Engineering”
LinkedIn: matthewskelton
Mastodon: @[email protected]
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Team Topologies
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Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press, 2019
teamtopologies.com/book
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“We are on a mission to make
work more humane and more
effective for everyone via
Team Topologies patterns and
principles.”
https://teamtopologies.com/mission
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Team Topologies ideas are now a key part
of the AWS ‘Well-architected’ guidance
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/devops-g
uidance/oa.std.1-organize-teams-into-distinct-topology-types-t
o-optimize-the-value-stream.html
“[OA.STD.1] Organize teams into distinct topology types
to optimize the value stream”
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Team Topologies ideas are now a key part
of the Azure ‘Cloud Adoption Framework’
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-fr
amework/ready/considerations/devops-teams-topologies
“Consider establishing an enabling team that can …
support applications and platforms … ”
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Team Topologies practices are predictive of
higher organizational performance - SODOR
https://www.puppet.com/resources/state-of-devops-report
“Highly evolved organizations tend to follow the
Team Topologies model”
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How can we use Enabling teams to
enhance flow and diffuse practices
across the organization at scale?
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[Key message]
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Why: the cost of tangled software
Effective Enabling teams
Enabling teams - the TT approach
Real-world examples + starting
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The cost of ‘tangled’
software
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CEO
🏢
● “Why does everything
take so
loooooooooong?”
● More predictable
results
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CFO
💰
● Financial efficiency from
reducing dependencies
○ (reshaping team and
system architecture
and communications)
● Increased financial
transparency
○ (better cost tracking at
all levels)
Organizations need:
● Quicker time to value
● Better financial transparency
● Increased staff engagement
● Reduced coordination costs
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If each engineer in the
organization is blocked for
1 hour per working day,
how much does this cost?
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● Fully-loaded cost: €160k per year
● 260 paid days per year
● Total of 400 engineers
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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 💥
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Case Study
JP Morgan
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Case Study
“How JP Morgan Applied Team
Topologies to Improve Flow in a
Market Leading Enterprise Platform”
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https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=y3OL7dv2l48
Fast Flow Conf 💖
https://www.fastflowconf.com/
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Case Study
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Case Study
“60% of dependencies
reduced through better
team design” 🎉
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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]
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Cost of Delay
https://blackswanfarming.com/four-steps-to-quantifying-cost-of-delay/
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1 - Organizing for fast flow helps us
to remove inter-team dependencies,
improving financial efficiency
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Enabling teams -
the Team Topologies
approach
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Team Topologies
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Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press, 2019
teamtopologies.com/book
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Organization operating model constraints
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1. Focus on flow
2. Ensure there is high trust inside teams
3. Design teams to be persistent (long-lived)
4. Limit team cognitive load
5. Enable rapid, safe changes to apps, data, infrastructure, etc.
6. Ensure that incentives are healthy for 24x7 operation and on-call
7. Encourage teams to be close to their customers - internal and external
8. Acknowledge that it is not possible to predict the behaviour of modern
complex software ecosystems - design your processes to match
9. Encourage ongoing discovery and innovation at team and product levels
10. Avoid teams waiting on many other teams during delivery
Learning from
“DevOps” since 2008
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1 - Focus on flow
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2 - Ensure there is high
trust inside teams
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3 - Design teams to be
persistent (long-lived)
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4 - Limit team cognitive load
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5 - Enable rapid, safe
changes to apps, data,
infrastructure, etc.
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6 - Ensure that incentives are
healthy for 24x7 operation
and on-call
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7 - Encourage teams to be
close to their customers -
internal and external
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8 - Acknowledge that it is not possible to
predict the behaviour of modern complex
software ecosystems - design your
processes to match
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9 - Encourage ongoing
discovery and innovation at
team and product levels
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10 - Avoid teams waiting
on many other teams
during delivery
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“Team Topologies is a set of
coherent patterns to
encourage emergent
behaviours for fast flow”
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Matthew Skelton
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The "flow of change" is the
work/changes needed for a
product or service on an ongoing
basis (aka “flow of value”)
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“Flow” emphasizes the
continuous nature of developing
and running modern
software-enriched services
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Implications of fast flow
for teams and roles
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Flow unblocker
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Boundary finder
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Platform to reduce
cognitive load
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…
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Flow boundary discovery
techniques from the
Team Topologies
community
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Independent Service
Heuristics (ISH)
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“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
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User Needs Mapping
(UNM)
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“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
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Team Interaction Modeling
(TIM)
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“[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
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Team Topologies provides:
● Language for dealing with flow,
boundaries, architecture, dynamics
● Heuristics (clues) for organizing teams
and software
● A focus on fast flow as a key driver
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The constraints on interactions
provide signals to tell us when
boundaries are not good for fast
flow
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The constraints on interactions
provide signals to tell us about
intent/mission, capabilities, skills,
strategy, and lots more…
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TT principle #3
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fast flow
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Organizing for fast flow means we
are happy with: duplication, (a few)
different versions, async + eventual
consistency, ‘internal marketplace’,
etc.
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TT principle #4
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team cognitive load
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Using team cognitive load as a key
architectural and design principle
means we have a humane,
compassionate, and realistic
workplace
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TT principle #5
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thinnest viable platform (TVP)
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TVP avoids ‘platform bloat’ by
focusing on enhancing flow and
reducing team cognitive load -
rather than technology
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TT principle #6
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empower teams to adjust
boundaries to enhance flow
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Empowering teams to adjust
boundaries for flow uses local
knowledge for regular incremental
gains, avoiding a dreaded ‘Re-org’
every 5 years
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2 - Evolving at speed requires a set
of core principles and practices,
with people trained up and engaged
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Enabling teams
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Improve flow
Diffuse practices
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Improving flow
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Uplift skills, practices,
capabilities
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Flow of change
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Detect skills gaps →
training
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Flow of change
HR / L&D / Skills
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Feedback: platform
improvements
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Flow of change
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Help to adjust team
boundaries
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Flow of change
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3 - Enabling teams play an active,
informed role in upskilling,
detecting gaps, improving
platforms, and adjusting team
boundaries
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Diffusing practices
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Detecting novel
practices that work
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Facilitating group
learning events: talks,
workshops, conferences
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Nurturing community
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Avoiding standardization,
creating FOMO
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4 - Enabling teams seek out and
amplify good approaches by
diffusing good practices across team
and department boundaries
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Effective Enabling teams
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Help teams to become
decoupled & independent
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Discover common problems
across multiple teams
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Work with platforms to
recommend useful services
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Detect and bridge capability gaps in
Stream-aligned teams (SATs) to help
the teams become decoupled and
independent through new skills
Discover common problems across
multiple teams
Liaise with platforms to recommend
and shape useful services for SATs
Enabling teams
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“How would this approach affect
flow, cognitive load, stewardship,
architecture, product viability,
boundaries, … both inside and
outside the ~8-person team?”
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How can we bring some coherence to
different Enabling team activities
across the organization?
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Enabling Enabling Teams
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PATTERN 5
EXAMPLE
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Expect a few different approaches
at the same time, but not tens or
100s. Learn quickly, diffuse the
learning, adopt the most effective
approaches.
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Ongoing diffusion of learning
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Talks
CoP
Internal
conference
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Internal Tech
Conferences
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Accelerate Multi-team Learning
Victoria Morgan-Smith and
Matthew Skelton
Conflux Books, 2019
internaltechconf.com
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5 - Many roles previously focused on
managing coupling & dependencies
shift focus to continuously
unblocking flow
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Real-world examples +
getting started with
Enabling teams
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Case Study
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Case Study
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Large European banking group
10+ countries
Central & Eastern Europe
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Case Study
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“We at RBI have established a
successful team of Engineering
Coaches based on this ideas that help
teams to improve their development
process and their testing and test
automation approach”
https://rruzitschka.medium.com/team-topologies-as-an-organizational-pattern-language-part-3-8a84704e218a
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Case Study
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“It is crucial not to see this team as a
resource pool as this would severely
impact the autonomy of the stream
aligned team.”
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Case Study
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“The engineering coaches are a team
of Senior Engineers with … (practical)
experience in the area of CI/CD and
Testing/Test Automation. Their task
is … work with the hosting teams and
coach them …”
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Case Study
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“Coaches work ideally around 50% of
their time with the team. The rest of
their time is used for self-training,
training others and community work
in guilds and chapters.”
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Case Study
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“The coaches are also expected to be
ambassadors for our central
engineering platform and must be
able to explain the benefits of good
engineering practices. ”
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Case Study
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https://rruzitschka.medium.com/team-topologies-as-an-organizational-pattern-language-part-3-8a84704e218a
Robert Ruzitschka
Engineering Coach at Raiffeisen Bank International
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6 - Enabling teams contain people
with significant experience used as
a “force multiplier”
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Case Study
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Case Study
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Fintech scale-up, HQ in NL
Open Banking APIs - SaaS
150+ bank customers
50+ countries
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Case Study
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“colleagues interested in a
common topic can form a book
club and … attend various
conferences and workshops.”
https://mambu.com/insights/articles/leading-dynamic-teams-autonomy-and-alignment
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Case Study
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“new and valuable learnings are
usually presented during internal
workshops boosting team
knowledge and improving
alignment.”
https://mambu.com/insights/articles/leading-dynamic-teams-autonomy-and-alignment
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Case Study
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[ Agile Coaches formed a
community to help facilitate
rapid adoption of practices
from Team Topologies ]
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Case Study
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https://mambu.com/insights/articles/leading-dynamic-teams-autonomy-and-alignment
Ionut Penciuc
System Owner at Mambu
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7 - Enabling teams play a key role in
developing and sustaining a
‘generative’ culture
(a learning organization)
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Team Topologies Academy
academy.teamtopologies.com
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Effective Enabling Teams
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https://academy.teamtopologies.com/courses/effective-enabling-teams
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Internal Tech
Conferences
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Accelerate Multi-team Learning
Victoria Morgan-Smith and
Matthew Skelton
Conflux Books, 2019
internaltechconf.com
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Why: the cost of tangled software
Effective Enabling teams
Enabling teams - the TT approach
Real-world examples + starting
136
136
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How can we use Enabling teams to
enhance flow and diffuse practices
across the organization at scale?
137
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1 - Organizing for fast flow helps us
to remove inter-team dependencies,
improving financial efficiency
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2 - Evolving at speed requires a set
of core principles and practices,
with people trained up and engaged
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3 - Enabling teams play an active,
informed role in upskilling,
detecting gaps, improving
platforms, and adjusting team
boundaries
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4 - Enabling teams seek out and
amplify good approaches by
diffusing good practices across team
and department boundaries
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5 - Many roles previously focused on
managing coupling & dependencies
shift focus to continuously
unblocking flow
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6 - Enabling teams contain people
with significant experience used as
a “force multiplier”
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7 - Enabling teams play a key role in
developing and sustaining a
‘generative’ culture
(a learning organization)
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Step up
Embrace flow
Help nurture learning
Act as a 10x force for good
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