Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

To make things worse, before 2013 new software-development projects were financed with capital expenditure (CapEx) but the IT operations activities were treated as operational expenditure (OpEx,) which produced a sharp divide between teams building things and teams running things. Software development (Dev) time was booked 90% to CapEx; effectively, they were told, “You must build new things.” They could not work on fixes or things that were right for the customer. Dev was working to serve the “boss” of product management rather than users of the services. We knew we had to change this. So in 2013, we moved everyone to OpEx. Now everyone is simply doing the work needed to make the company money. With our OpEx-only model, everyone is closer to the customer because we are not thinking about “building new stuff for the product manager” but meeting the needs of users.