Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

An enabling team proactively seeks to understand the needs of stream-aligned teams, establishing regular checkpoints and jointly agreeing when more collaboration is needed. An enabling team stays ahead of the curve in keeping abreast of new approaches, tooling, and practices in their area of expertise, well before an actual need is expected from stream-aligned teams. In the past, this has been the mission of architecture or innovation teams, but the focus on enabling other teams creates a better dynamic. An enabling team acts as a messenger of both good news (e.g., “There’s a new UI automation framework that can reduce our custom test code by 50%.”) and bad news (e.g., “Javascript framework X, which we’re using extensively, is no longer actively maintained.”). This helps with management of the technology life cycle. Occasionally, the enabling team might act as a proxy for external (or internal) services that are currently too difficult for stream-aligned teams to use directly. An enabling team promotes learning not only inside the enabling team but across stream-aligned teams, acting as a curator that facilitates appropriate knowledge sharing inside the organization (supporting what Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister call a “key learning function.”