Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

However, with rapid and constant change to software systems, successful organizations are now looking again at the composition and placement of support teams to aid the flow of change rapidly and safely. The model for IT support that consistently seems to work best has two aspects: (1) support teams aligned to the stream of changes, and (2) dynamic cross-team activity to resolve live service incidents. In this model, if dedicated support teams are needed, they are aligned to the stream of change, alongside a team or squad building the software systems. The team with a focus on support sits within the family or tribe of teams that are aligned to the same stream of change. In this context, the team providing support tends to evolve a greater awareness for the experience of the user of the whole service, adding end-to-end synthetic transaction monitoring, particularly in situations where IT and software are only a minor aspect. In fact, some organizations rename such teams “service-experience teams” to take account of the fact that the end-to-end user experience may involve much more than just IT systems,