The team is the unit of transformation

In enterprise technology we like to count things: applications, petabytes of data, physical and virtual servers, gigabits of bandwidth and so on. Even if it's often surprisingly difficult to find them all and figure out what state they're, you know where you are with things.

It's not surprising, therefore, that when we attempt transformation, we often plan and measure success in terms of these things. We are shifting to a new operating system: how many servers have we upgraded? We are unlocking access to our data with APIs: guess many APIs have we built? We are moving to the Cloud: how many applications have we migrated?

The problem with measuring transformation like this is that it leaves out the most important thing: the people.

I argued a few weeks ago that, for Cloud migration, we should make sure that we take teams to the Cloud, not just applications. The more I think about this, the more I realise that it applies to all enterprise technology transformation, not just Cloud adoption.

One of the many disadvantages of thinking of enterprise technology in terms of things that we can count, is that it can lead us to think that our architectures are made of these stable objects, and that the people who develop, maintain and operate them are ephemeral adjuncts to those objects. People come and go, we think (especially if we organise our work into projects and disband our teams when projects finish), but things endure.

But if we've worked in enterprise technology for any time, it doesn't take much reflection to realise how wrong this perspective is. Whatever projects we organise our work into, whatever asset management system or architecture repository we use, whatever spreadsheets we use to track the progress of our transformation programme, we know that the team is where the work gets done. We know that, if we change the technology, and don't give the team that runs it the chance to learn and grow, it won't make any difference.

Despite this apparent truth, it seems hard to remember when we plan transformation. I think that it would help if we held one thought in our minds: the team is the unit of transformation.

I think that this thought reminds us of three things.

First, it reminds us to organise our transformation efforts around teams. When we find ourselves compiling those catalogues of things, we can ask ourselves what we want to be different when our transformation is complete. Do we want our things to be in a different place, or to have slightly different attributes? Or do we want our teams to be operating differently, with greater agility, greater reliability and greater fulfilment. Thinking of the team as the unit of transformation reminds us why we are doing transformation in the first place.

Second, it reminds us to look for transformation opportunities everywhere, even in initiatives we think of as mundane. For example, imagine that you have a large number of OS instances which are out of date and about to go out of support (I am sure that you would never have such a problem). You could organise the remediation work around the OS instances, compile the list and grind through the upgrade. Or you could ask yourself what it is about your team structure, about their accountabilities, about the way that their priorities are set, that led to such a situation in the first place. Thinking of the team as the unit of transformation reminds us that transformation can be continuous and ubiquitous.

Third, it reminds us of what is special about leading technology teams. If we think of our technology function as a set of things, then we risk reducing the people who manage those things to a set of tasks, processes and transactions, with all the excitement boiled out of them. If we think of our technology function as a set of teams working with purpose and skill to get the best out of the technology they look after, then we stand a chance of realising the true value of empowered, skilled humans. Thinking of the team as the unit of transformation reminds us just how powerful technology transformation can be.

I realise that I’ve repeated the team as the unit of transformation more times than you may care to read. But I think it bears repeating: unless we keep the thought in the forefront of our mind, we may go back to the world of things and forget the people.

(Views in this article are my own.)