Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

A healthy organizational culture: an environment that supports the professional development of individuals and teams—one in which people feel empowered and safe to speak out about problems, and the organization expects to learn continuously. Good engineering practices: test-first design and development of all aspects of the systems, a focus on continuous delivery and operability practices, pairing and mobbing for code review, avoiding the search for a single “root cause” for incidents, designing for testability, and so on. Healthy funding and financial practices: avoiding the pernicious effects of a CapEx/OpEx split between different parts of the IT organization (or at least mitigating the worst aspects of this by estimating CapEx/OpEx through sampling the work), avoiding project-driven deadlines and large-batch budgeting wherever possible, and allocating training budgets to teams or groups rather than individuals. Clarity of business vision: the executive or leadership provides a clear, non-conflicting vision and direction for the rest of the organization, with horizons at human-relevant timescales (such as three months, six months, twelve months) and clear reasoning behind the priorities, so people in the organization can understand how and why these were chosen.