-
Team interaction is a key concept when redesigning an organization for business agility and speed.
-
These interactions will be reflected in the software being built (see Conway's Law) and indicate how effectively teams can autonomously deliver value to their customers.
-
Our advice is to be intentional about how teams are designed and how they interact. Because we believe that organizational design and team interactions evolve over time, we think it's particularly important to measure and keep track of the team cognitive load, which indicates how easy or difficult teams find building, testing and maintaining their services. We've been using a template to assess team cognitive load that is based on ideas by the authors of the Team Topologies book.
-
We continue to be impressed by the positive impact of applying this book's concepts when communicating to clients and redesigning organizations.
-
The authors recommend a simple but powerful approach to organizational design, identifying just four types of teams and three modes of interaction; this helps reduce ambiguity within the organization and provides a common vocabulary for teams, stakeholders and leadership to describe and design a team's work.
-
To implement an org design change, we design the ideal to-be team topologies structure, apply any technical/staffing constraints (i.e., not enough employees) and then end up with the final to-be structure. That allows us to better advise clients and anticipate whether we're indeed improving cognitive load by comparing the as-is/to-be team structures.
Industry Examples:
https://teamtopologies.com/industry-examples/tag/Team+Cognitive+Load