Opening Keynote: Team Topologies – core agility for the self-steering organization

Many organizations lack the core organizational practices to be able to respond flexibly to changing business contexts. Organizations are often “stiff” and inflexible, lacking awareness of what the organization can achieve, and shackled by rigid frameworks that prevent movement and suppleness.

The book Team Topologies points the way to profound changes for the operating model for organizations building and running software-enriched services. At the heart of Team Topologies is the principle of fast flow: multiple ongoing streams of changes to software-enriched services done safely and sustainably.

Team Topologies acts like yoga or pilates for the organization, providing core agility and situational awareness that helps the organization to become more nimble and adaptable, more realistic in terms of capabilities, and ultimately more ready to achieve great things.

Using the Team Topologies patterns, organizations can expect to see significant benefits, including:

Increased business agility – the ability to respond rapidly to changing internal and external conditions.
Increased clarity of purpose at all levels of the organization.
Shared language for navigating all kinds of knowledge-work.
A more harmonious relationship between technology and people.
Increased staff wellbeing and engagement (autonomy, mastery, purpose).

In this talk, Matthew Skelton – co-author of the book Team Topologies – explores some of the benefits of adopting Team Topologies (and fast flow generally) in terms of wider organizational and business goals, and how organizations can become more nimble by adopting the underlying “core agility” practices that Team Topologies provides.