What are Enabling Teams?

What are Enabling Teams?

An Enabling team is the second type of team under team topologies. Enabling teams are meant to support and elevate the kind of work stream-aligned teams do. Here is how:

In an earlier article, we had gone through cognitive load - a team's limitations in knowledge, skill, and expertise. Now, in a rapidly moving industry such as IT, where innovations are at an all-time high, it is evident that any team which does not upskill will not be able to sustain itself for long.?

However, as we saw in the previous article, stream-aligned teams are involved with the end-to-end operations of delivering a product. Hence, there is no time to research, upskill, and gain new capabilities.

This is precisely where Enabling Teams come in. As the name suggests, this team comprises individuals who specialize in domains and elevate the stream-aligned teams regarding their capabilities.?

Enabling teams focus on the stream-aligned teams' problems, their gaps, and the areas where they can improve. Their research and capabilities are directed towards these. It is less about the solution they can provide but more about how to have a system that can solve the stream-aligned teams' problems.?

To extend this logic, any stream-aligned team must not entirely rely on the enabling team. Instead, the enabling team works temporarily, so once the enabling team is involved and gets the job done, the enabling team should not be required for the next few months.?

A few examples would be the teams needing help with continuous delivery, automation testing, deployment of software, etc. So, the enabling teams would provide guidance in these aspects and hence are highly collaborative.?

Numerous case studies prove how enabling teams can improve the work of stream-aligned teams and help them increase their capabilities by 10 to 15 times. According to Matthew Skelton, these teams must have the following characteristics:

Enabling teams proactively work toward understanding the various facets of stream-aligned teams' work and the challenges they face.?

They are always up to date with the latest trends and standards in software development and DevOps and should stay that way to equip the stream-aligned teams better.?

This way, their awareness of the relevant tools, approach toward product development, and best practices in any scenario is at an all-time high.?

Enabling teams ensures that there is constant learning in the organization within their team and across other teams as well.?

Based on the platforms the steam-aligned teams use, the enabling teams share periodic updates about these tools, such as the latest features, the hacks that can increase efficiency, etc.?

Overall, these are a few things that the Enabling teams are in charge of. In the following article, we will be looking at Complicated-Subsystem Teams.?