Team Topologies: Modeling the Modern Enterprise

Introduction to Modern Enterprise Modeling

Given the fast changes businesses face, enterprises must continuously evolve to stay competitive. This evolution involves adopting advanced modelling techniques that streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation. Modern enterprise modelling is an integrated approach encompassing various business processes, systems, and structures to create a cohesive and efficient organisation. But how can Team Topologies be the key to your business?

The evolution of organisational structures

In last year’s trend report, we discussed the emergence of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that enable application teams and reduce the cognitive load for developers within organisations. This past year, we have seen the industry embrace this approach and many more organisations continue to do so. We learned that treating the platform-as-a-product and focusing on the end user is best suited to building these modern platforms.

We also observe several organisations making the technological leap without the necessary organisational structures. Any attempt to make a managerial change should also consider how teams are organised and interact.

Team Topologies offers a set of principles and methods that enable organisations to establish effective collaboration, autonomy, delivery focus, and product alignment while structuring and evolving their teams. Let us look at why the Team Topologies framework is an emerging trend.

Dysfunctional platform teams

Every IT organisation is a collection of teams of people. Over decades of IT, practitioners have observed through their insights and personal experiences that most delivery issues ultimately stem from one question: How are the teams organized?

Organisational structure is crucial to success. Technology comes later. Many organisations will require a platform team or multiple such teams to integrate commonly needed services and tools to support their business teams.

We often find platform teams as large as entire departments, composed of several subgroups of members focused on different parts of the problem. Dysfunction usually arises when the platform team focuses on providing a technology-specific service, such as a database or tooling, instead of enabling business outcomes.

Also, the large size of these ‘teams’ tends to dilute the focus away from business goals, and decision-making is often an ordeal. Ideally, you want a small but not too small team—a “Two Pizza” team, for example—that can stay nimble and focused on delivering business value. Interactions with the rest of the organisation also suffer when you have large technology-focused teams. Maintaining a steady software flow requires teams to collaborate healthily.

Team Topologies: Maturing Organisational Models

This is Conway’s law. It observes that the structure of a software system or architecture tends to mirror the organisational structure of the team(s) responsible for its development. Conway’s law heavily inspires modern organizational approaches like Team Topologies. Building on commonly accepted Agile software methods, these approaches further assist teams in creating modern platforms.

Team Topologies is a tool to evolve a complex organisation into a simpler, more responsive one. Responsiveness, decoupling, and alignment to business needs is key, almost akin to breaking up the monolith in architectural terms.

Team topologies in short

Team topologies are a way to organise the enterprise to deliver value efficiently by teams adopting modern software and platform architectures. They are about creating structure, reducing cognitive load, and enabling team collaboration.

It does this by addressing two key topics: Team Types and Team Interactions.

Team Types

Identify your current teams and map them to one of the following different team types.

• Stream-aligned teams

These long-term, business-goal-oriented teams develop and maintain a specific business service. Stream-aligned teams use internal infrastructure platforms but are focused on building business services.

• Platform teams

One (or more in larger organisations) team is responsible for building the internal platform that provides services and tooling for the stream-aligned teams. When building the internal platform, they are strongly customer-focused and product-centric.

• Enabling teams

Expert teams help reduce cognitive load and bridge knowledge gaps in stream-aligned teams. These teams are often short-term and do not own any software components.

• Complicated subsystem teams

Groups of experts dealing with aspects of services spanning several stream-aligned teams to address a specific, often complicated problem.

Interactions models

Team Topologies suggests the following interaction models between teams.

• Collaboration

Two teams working closely together for a limited amount of time for discovery purposes or to bridge knowledge gaps.

• X-as-a-service

After the collaboration phase, the natural end state of team interaction is that each team provides precise service to other teams, prioritising good customer experience.

The Team Topologies book of the same name provides a valuable introduction to applying the Team Topologies model to construct and refine an organisational model.

Team Topologies: Practical considerations

We know that getting rid of hand-offs and silos is crucial in enabling flow within the organisation. Change starts with recognition at the management level. Well-organised teams will deliver well-architected platforms faster and with reduced coordination.

Management intent and action are the first steps towards this transformation. With management setting the direction, execution can begin piecing the puzzle of team restructuring. Start with the primary focus on making stream-aligned teams. Create small, long-term teams for maximum impact, almost like an organisational mirror of a microservices architecture. Define team interaction contracts that remove friction.

These changes are often challenging, especially within large organisations where people and teams struggle with constant firefighting. A practical approach here is to apply the Inverse Conway Maneuver. This approach aims to align the organisation’s communication structure with the software architecture developed to match the desired one. Combined with other Agile practices such as Scrum and OKRs, it can be a potent way to build highly effective teams.

Outlook

A digital platform is the collection of APIs, services, and tooling and the knowledge and support it provides to its users. Industry analysts at Gartner recognised the emergence of modern Platform Engineering as no mere hype. We will continue to see the growing adoption of modern organisational modelling techniques like Team Topologies across the industry.

Technology might be an enabler, but it is the people and teams that are going to drive success. What matters now is how quickly the organisation can adapt to change. We could be at the cusp of rapid technological changes fuelled by the advent of modern AI. How resilient is the organisation to such disruption? This is where practices like Team Topologies may be best used, not as a prescriptive framework but as one of gradual evolution. Read more on this topic from this success story.