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.
A system's architecture mimics an organizational structure and its communication. It's not big news that we should be intentional about how teams interact — see, for instance, the Inverse Conway Maneuver. Team interaction is one of the variables for how fast and how easily teams can deliver value to their customers. We were happy to find a way to measure these interactions; we used the Team Topologies author's assessment which gives you an understanding of how easy or difficult the teams find it to build, test and maintain their services. By measuring team cognitive load, we could better advise our clients on how to change their teams' structure and evolve their interactions.
A system's architecture mimics organizational structure and its communication. It's not big news that we should be intentional about how teams interact — see, for instance, the Inverse Conway Maneuver. Team interaction is one of the variables for how fast and how easily teams can deliver value to their customers. We were happy to find a way to measure these interactions; we used the Team Topologies author's assessment which gives you an understanding of how easy or difficult the teams find it to build, test and maintain their services. By measuring team cognitive load, we could better advise our clients on how to change their teams' structure and evolve their interactions.
A system's architecture mimics organizational structure and its communication. It's not big news that we should be intentional about how teams interact — see, for instance, the Inverse Conway Maneuver. Team interaction is one of the variables for how fast and how easily teams can deliver value to their customers. We were happy to find a way to measure these interactions; we used the Team Topologies author's assessment which gives you an understanding of how easy or difficult the teams find it to build, test and maintain their services. By measuring team cognitive load, we could better advise our clients on how to change their teams' structure and evolve their interactions.
