Team topological imbalance as an indicator of the need for Data-Driven IT-Modernization

Data-driven IT-Modernization enables organizations to be more agile and responsive to change. It helps organizations to improve efficiency, performance, and customer experience. In addition, it helps organizations to reduce costs and increase organization competitiveness. Yet, a lot of organizations struggle in making the jump from old and slow systems to fast-adaptive, agile, data-driven IT-systems. This is because companies face a range of challenges that clearly indicate the requirement to modernize a given legacy application.?Here, advanced computing and visualization technologies – provided by?exxfer?– help identifying areas within a system landscape that require modernization.

What role do team topologies play in data-driven IT-Modernization?

Initially introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, team topologies are a rather new solution to software delivery in modern organizations. It is a socio-technical approach to building software systems that has proven useful in organizing business and technology teams for fast flow and organization evolution.?

It is no secret; the foundation for continuous and sustainable delivery of value for any company are effective software teams. And for that, the team structures should be free of ambiguity in ownership and the communication pathways should be clear. Here, team topologies are a helpful tool by aiming to optimize team interactions for better flow. The goal is the transition from monolithic systems to microservices since monoliths consist of complex dependencies that slow down the pace of delivery.

Needless to say, team topological imbalance leads to circumstances such as low team productivity, low velocity, lots of unplanned work and lack of product feature proximity. On top, the team is under heavy load permanently and a large number of meetings is required to plan upcoming work and get things done.

It is important to note that team topological imbalance heavily correlates with team cognitive load. If an IT-system is monolithic, and the team too big, it often results in a blocked flow of work across teams. But even though team cognitive load is part of the problem, it is also part of the solution. Many firms have used team cognitive load to ameliorate their software systems. In particular, over the past few?years many companies have started to adopt microservices to deploy their software systems faster by focusing more on different specific areas of the system.?

How exactly can team topological imbalance be avoided?

There are four key metrics that measure organizational performance: Lead time for changes, deployment frequency, MTTR and change failure rate. If a software system is too big, the lead time and deployment frequency extend. If the software is too complex, restoration of the service takes longer, so the MTTR extends. Thus, the bigger the software, the lesser organizational agility.?

The solution? The size of the software services and products must be limited to the cognitive load the team can handle. Every service must be fully owned by a team with enough cognitive capacity to set it up and manage it.

How does data-driven IT-Modernization help achieving this?

Data-driven IT-Modernization supports organization and tech alignment. As elaborated above, software sizing and cognitive work are crucial. That’s why exxfer measures and observes how teams collaborate and how technologies are being used.?

Since?low cohesion and high coupling values cause team topological imbalance, those are an indicator for issues with the domain model. Here, exxfer aims at remodulating existing IT-systems by shifting parts of the application to other places. This is done by finding answers to questions such as: Who works together on features? Who is most involved in changes? How mature are check-ins to source-code repositories??

Optimizing team topology based on findings generated with exxfer in turn leads to more cross-functional and autonomous teams that fully identify with their product and improve continuously. exxfer helps synchronizing team design and IT-system architecture for more efficiency, resulting in a minimum amount of unplanned work.?This leads us to the last question:

Are you sure your team is the most efficient it can be?

If you want to learn more about exxfer and how exactly we can support you with the identification of bottlenecks, quantification, and visualization of technical potential, feel free to contact me.