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TeamTopologies.com
@TeamTopologies
Conway’s Law
Is Out to Get You!
Manuel Pais
Co-author of Team Topologies
#PMOwfh - 20 May 2020
@manupaisable

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Conway’s Law
Team Cognitive Load
Stream-Aligned Teams
Team API

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Who am I ?
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Independent IT organizational consultant and trainer
Ex-dev, ex-build manager, ex-tester, ex-QA lead
LinkedIn instructor on Continuous Delivery
Co-author of the book Team Topologies

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Team Topologies
4
Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press
Order via stores worldwide: teamtopologies.com/book

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Conway’s Law
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“Any organization that designs a
system (defined broadly) will
produce a design whose structure is
a copy of the organization's
communication structure.”
– Mel Conway, 1968
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Reverse
Conway
Image from Max Pixel

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Organization design
is a constraint on the
“solution search space”

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Team Cognitive Load
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“Software that
fits in your head”
- Daniel Terhorst-North
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https://speakerdeck.com/tastapod/microservices-software-that-fits-in-your-head?slide=62

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“Software that
fits in our heads”

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4 key metrics: ‘Accelerate’
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lead time
deployment frequency
mean time to restore (MTTR)
change fail percentage

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COGNITIVE LOAD:
The total amount of
mental effort being used
in the working memory
- John Sweller
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COGNITIVE LOAD
From a software
delivery team POV
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Intrinsic
Extraneous
Germane
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“How are
classes
defined in
Java?”

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Intrinsic
Extraneous
Germane
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“How do I
deploy this
app,
again?”

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Intrinsic
Extraneous
Germane
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“How do
bank
transfers
work?”

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Intrinsic (skills)
Extraneous (mechanism)
Germane (domain focus)
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(Intrinsic)
] Extraneous [
Germane
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COGNITIVE LOAD
From a PMO POV ???
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(Intrinsic)
] Extraneous [
Germane
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COGNITIVE LOAD
From a software
delivery team POV
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Limit the size of software
services/products to the
cognitive load that the
team can handle.
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Unbounded cognitive load

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https://twitter.com/RobMeaney/status/1189928318499471368

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Assess cognitive load
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https://forms.gle/UD4e1uGzwnrikCDYA

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Stream-Aligned
Teams
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Business AlignmentImage from Max Pixel

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Feature

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Feature

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Team ownership must include:
Releasability
Testability
Operability / Supportability

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Each service must be fully
owned by a team with
sufficient cognitive capacity
to build and operate it.

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autonomy

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competences

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How to alleviate the tension between:
team autonomy (increases flow)
and
lack of competences (decreases flow)

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The success of supporting
teams is the success of
stream-aligned teams

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Team API
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Team API
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● Code & artifacts owned by the team
● Versioning & testing approach
● Wiki and documentation
● Ways of working
● Roadmap & priorities
● Communication preferences (when/how)

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“For effective team-first ownership
of software, teams need to
continuously define, advertise, test,
and evolve their Team API”
Team Topologies, p.48
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https://github.com/TeamTopologies/Team-API-template

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Conway’s Law
Team Cognitive Load
Stream-Aligned Teams
Team API

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Getting started
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Getting started
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Explicit cognitive load

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How well can the team as a unit “grok”
the systems they own and develop?
Explicit cognitive load
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Push some things into a Platform?
Explicit cognitive load
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Are skills or capabilities missing?
Explicit cognitive load
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Getting started
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Explicit cognitive load
Misaligned work streams
Team Interactions
Thinnest Viable Platform

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Does it frequently take three or more
teams to change a single user journey?
Misaligned work streams
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Are development teams assumed to
know and comply with regulations?
Misaligned work streams
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Is “cost reduction” the holy grail?
Misaligned work streams
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Getting started
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Large Conway mismatches

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Are there major mismatches between
the team interactions and the required
software / system architecture?
What could be easily adjusted?
Large Conway mismatches
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65.
Getting started
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Explicit cognitive load
Misaligned work streams
Large Conway mismatches

66.
Team Topologies
67
Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press
Order via stores worldwide: teamtopologies.com/book

67.
Workbook
coming soon...
Team Topologies
for Remote Teams
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for Remote
Teams
Sign up for news: teamtopologies.com/newsletter
Icon by Pixel perfect from www.flaticon.com

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Remote-
Friendly
Training
🠊 teamtopologies.com/training
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Remote-Friendly
Assessments
🠊 teamtopologies.com/assessments
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Team Topologies for Project Managers
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ascent.pmi.org
self-paced 4-hour online course
TT4PM20
20% discount code
Other courses from:
Peter Drucker, Jeff
Gothelf & Josh Seiden,
Patty Azzarello, and
others

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Free Resources
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Remote-first interactions
teamtopologies.com/remote-first
Free tools & templates
github.com/teamtopologies

72.
Thank you!
73
Matthew Skelton, Conflux
@matthewpskelton
Manuel Pais, Independent
@manupaisable
teamtopologies.com