Wednesday 20th May: We'll be looking at Conway's Law with Manuel Pais, Co-Author of 'Team Topologies: Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow'. In this informative and enlightening session, we'll be exploring how you can use exploit Conway's law and use it to your advantage. We'll also be looking at how communication structures, cognitive load, and alignment all play a crucial role in accelerating delivery and enabling delivery teams.

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

2. 2
Conway’s Law
Team Cognitive Load
Stream-Aligned Teams
Team API

3. Who am I ?
3
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

4. 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

5. Conway’s Law
5

6. “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
6

7. 7

8. 8

9. 9
Reverse
Conway
Image from Max Pixel

10. 10

11. 11

12. 12
Organization design
is a constraint on the
“solution search space”

13. Team Cognitive Load
13

14. “Software that
fits in your head”
- Daniel Terhorst-North
14
https://speakerdeck.com/tastapod/microservices-software-that-fits-in-your-head?slide=62

15. 15
“Software that
fits in our heads”

16. 4 key metrics: ‘Accelerate’
16
lead time
deployment frequency
mean time to restore (MTTR)
change fail percentage

17. COGNITIVE LOAD:
The total amount of
mental effort being used
in the working memory
- John Sweller
17

18. COGNITIVE LOAD
From a software
delivery team POV
18

19. Intrinsic
Extraneous
Germane
19
“How are
classes
defined in
Java?”

20. Intrinsic
Extraneous
Germane
20
“How do I
deploy this
app,
again?”

21. Intrinsic
Extraneous
Germane
21
“How do
bank
transfers
work?”

22. Intrinsic (skills)
Extraneous (mechanism)
Germane (domain focus)
22

23. (Intrinsic)
] Extraneous [
Germane
23

24. COGNITIVE LOAD
From a PMO POV ???
24

25. (Intrinsic)
] Extraneous [
Germane
25

26. COGNITIVE LOAD
From a software
delivery team POV
26

27. Limit the size of software
services/products to the
cognitive load that the
team can handle.
27

28. 28
Unbounded cognitive load

29. 29
https://twitter.com/RobMeaney/status/1189928318499471368

30. Assess cognitive load
30
https://forms.gle/UD4e1uGzwnrikCDYA

31. Stream-Aligned
Teams
31

32. 32

33. 33

34. 34
Business AlignmentImage from Max Pixel

35. 35

36. 36
Feature

37. 37

38. 38
Feature

39. 39
Team ownership must include:
Releasability
Testability
Operability / Supportability

40. 40
Each service must be fully
owned by a team with
sufficient cognitive capacity
to build and operate it.

41. 41
autonomy

42. 42
competences

43. 43
How to alleviate the tension between:
team autonomy (increases flow)
and
lack of competences (decreases flow)

45. 45

46. 46
The success of supporting
teams is the success of
stream-aligned teams

47. 47

48. 48

49. Team API
49

50. Team API
50
● Code & artifacts owned by the team
● Versioning & testing approach
● Wiki and documentation
● Ways of working
● Roadmap & priorities
● Communication preferences (when/how)

51. “For effective team-first ownership
of software, teams need to
continuously define, advertise, test,
and evolve their Team API”
Team Topologies, p.48
51

52. 52
https://github.com/TeamTopologies/Team-API-template

53. 53
Conway’s Law
Team Cognitive Load
Stream-Aligned Teams
Team API

54. Getting started
54

55. Getting started
55
Explicit cognitive load

56. How well can the team as a unit “grok”
the systems they own and develop?
Explicit cognitive load
56

57. 57

58. Push some things into a Platform?
Explicit cognitive load
58

59. Are skills or capabilities missing?
Explicit cognitive load
59

60. Getting started
60
Explicit cognitive load
Misaligned work streams
Team Interactions
Thinnest Viable Platform

61. Does it frequently take three or more
teams to change a single user journey?
Misaligned work streams
61

62. Are development teams assumed to
know and comply with regulations?
Misaligned work streams
62

63. Is “cost reduction” the holy grail?
Misaligned work streams
63

64. Getting started
64
Large Conway mismatches

65. Are there major mismatches between
the team interactions and the required
software / system architecture?
What could be easily adjusted?
Large Conway mismatches
65

66. Getting started
66
Explicit cognitive load
Misaligned work streams
Large Conway mismatches

67. 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

68. Workbook
coming soon...
Team Topologies
for Remote Teams
68
for Remote
Teams
Sign up for news: teamtopologies.com/newsletter
Icon by Pixel perfect from www.flaticon.com

69. Remote-
Friendly
Training
🠊 teamtopologies.com/training
69

70. Remote-Friendly
Assessments
🠊 teamtopologies.com/assessments
70

71. Team Topologies for Project Managers
71
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

72. Free Resources
72
Remote-first interactions
teamtopologies.com/remote-first
Free tools & templates
github.com/teamtopologies

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