From One To Many Teams
Have you ever organized productive work of a team? Then you probably started by asking yourself a set of questions like “How many people do you need?”, “What roles would they have?” and “What organizational structure should it have?”. Perhaps, you might think that a team can organize themselves the way they want because they are smart and independent professionals. Maybe, you would like use some framework to be aligned to corporate approach or be more transparent to management.
But what if your organisation has several teams, more that 3 or 5 or, maybe, 8, do you need to use use some framework to allow these teams work together? What if each team has their own internal framework? Teams need to interact with each other. Sometimes they need do cross planning, sometimes they need some kind of coordination to be sure that everyone is not doing the same feature, or features from different teams should be integrated.
To be sure that every team works on their own problem and teams openly collaborate with each other and at the same time are aligned to the company’s goals. You have to find the way of organisation these team interactions.
The Problem
I like the concept of of self organization of a team. Each company’s goal is pretty individual with their individual solution and the way to achieve this goal is unique too. It is impossible to find one-solution-for-all-teams approach it impossible in the higher level - teams interaction organisational framework.
What to do in this situation?
Of course you can find some framework which exists already and try to use it in your organisation. But there are no guarantees that any of these frameworks will fit your organisation or culture, especially if you are a startup where you don’t have much time to focus on the process rather the technology or product or your customers.
Team Topologies
My experience said will be better presented with some kind of lego-like framework, where you have prepared building blocks but you can build whatever you want. Build your own framework for your company specifically!
But what kinds of building blocks should they be?
I think it pretty simple and clear, we have to have Types of Teams and Types of their Interaction. Types of teams help understand what this team doing in general, internal team rules and processes are not important because you also have Interaction Type, like an API for a micro-service, when you don’t have to know how exactly this service works internally, but instead you just have to know what API uses as input and as an output - same for the team.
This approach is called Team Topologies and this is something that can can help to adapt your working process for your company, department and whatever you want.
Team Topologies is a clear, easy-to-follow approach to modern software delivery with an emphasis on optimizing team interactions for flow.
There are four fundamental types of teams - Team Topologies and three core team interaction modes combine with awareness of Conway’s Law, team cognitive load, and responsive organization evolution to define a no-nonsense, team-friendly, humanistic approach to building and running software systems.
Devised by experienced IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, the Team Topologies approach is informed by the well-known DevOps Team Topologies patterns (also authored and curated by Matthew and Manuel). Matthew and Manuel have worked with many organizations around the world to help them shape their teams for modern software delivery, and Team Topologies is the result of this experience.
The combination of different types of teams and their Interaction modes
I’m not trying to explain the whole methodology, you can do this using materials form the authors I just want to explain why, from my perspective, this a very interesting approach. This approach of organizing work is so natural (and well structured) that I like it very much.
And last thing which I find to be extremely interesting is that you don not even need to design the teams and the interaction they should have. What you need to integrate these approach into your company is just let your teams choose the type and interaction mode that they would like to you and you will be super close to self-organisation approach, just because you already have the necessary blocks.
Thank for reading this article till the end, I hope you’ll enjoy these methodology and it will help your teams and your company to focus not on processes but on building products and make the world a better place!!
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