Last Thursday I attended the Fast Flow Conference in London while here on my Churchill Fellowship.
Being at a tech-oriented conference was a nice change-up from the last month in New York City, Washington DC and London, where my conversations and reading have all been around the institutional and organisational factors influencing digital government.
My interest in the event sprung from having read the Team Topologies book from 2019. This was the first conference dedicated to the concepts in the book, and the authors were heavily involved in the conference.
If you haven’t read the book, it’s about how to organise business and technical teams to improve the flow of value, in contexts where there’s a high degree of change and the ability to be fast, adaptive and learn through quicker feedback is critical to success.
I’ve found it very useful as a product leader in Service NSW (in New South Wales, Australia) in building and re-organising digital teams at scale.
On to the talks
The day kicked-off with Matthew Skelton, one of the book’s authors, sharing his reflections four years after the book’s release. The ones that stood out for me were that:
many organisations, including many that are not predominantly software companies, have spoken publicly about applying Team Topologies (TT) concepts. Organisations in health care, HR, legal, accountancy, news & media and education are all applying TT concepts. His hypothesis is that all of these organisations are fundamentally doing knowledge work, which involves dealing with people, silos and specialisms. TT provides shared language, patterns and constraints to manage cognitive load, reduce handoffs and improve flow.
the concepts have been far more disruptive than the authors imagined, largely because anything that prioritises flow is ‘inherently alien’ to organisations run along Tailorist, hierarchical, bureaucratic lines
they got one thing wrong in the book: the ‘platform’ team type is not a fourth team type in its own right, but a container type for the three other types of team described in the book
all roles, not just digital roles, should be focused on flow, either a flow of change itself (eg software changes, onboarding a new employee), or supporting flow(s) of change (eg cloud platform service, legal or HR advice etc).
(I’ve since been wondering how the concept of ‘flow’, and the idea of optimising for it as an operating principle, fits with the public/civil service at a macro level. That might be one for another blog post).
Susanne Kaiser ran an elucidating session where she helped explain why and how one can combine Wardley Mapping, Domain Driven Design (DDD) and Team Topologies (TT) to design adaptive ‘socio-techncial’ systems.
She explained that Wardley Mapping is useful for understanding the business landscape and external forces, DDD to understanding business domains and aligning systems to business needs, and TT to align teams and their interactions to the system and the business strategy.
I’d never connected these concepts in this way before. Susanne’s got an upcoming book on this.
Rich Allen then urged us to start simple by mapping users, their needs, capabilities needed to meet those needs, and then identifying potential technical and team boundaries around those capabilities & needs.
He shared something he heard which really struck a chord with me: “don’t lead with the label” - ie never talk about Wardley Mapping, DDD or TT - just use simple language to describe what you’re going to do and why with colleagues and stakeholders, without using these intimidating, alien-sounding labels.
Fellow Australian Nigel Kersten, a co-author of the State of DevOps report over the years, gave a wonderful talk titled Software eats culture for breakfast. He challenged the direct obsession with ‘culture’, including by the DevOps movement of which he was a part. His thesis is that new software capabilities trigger more significant cultural change at large organisations than most deliberate efforts at changing culture do. New technologies like modern APIs, virtualisation, cloud and CI/CD have enabled new ways of working like devops and new team topologies to emerge and evolve.
This echoed the big ‘aha’ moment I remember having after reading the State of DevOps Reports and Accelerate - that software and technical practice influence ways of working and culture. If Nigel’s thesis is true, then I wonder if modern software adoption and technical practices within government will inevitably accelerate the digital maturity of governments?
My other highlight was hearing from Ben Davison and Polly Price about how they helped apply Team Topologies in the public sector. They talked us through their work with the UK Home Office and the UK National Health Service (NHS), helping to modernise their digital approach, and improving flow and each organisation’s ability to release software much more frequently in complex, regulated environments. They told us how the key IT decision-maker in the NHS during the COVID-19 crisis read the book and that it heavily influenced his approach during the crisis.
In a fireside chat to end the day Matthew Skelton shared one thing which resonated with me. He mentioned that Team Topologies complements other theories or concepts that see an organisation as a living thing or ecosystem full of humans, rather than as a machine.
There were lots of other interesting-looking talks that were in parallel streams, recordings of which are thankfully available online.
Some reflections
It was encouraging to meet and talk to people in government in the UK who are already applying or thinking about the usefulness of these concepts in improving government services.
My other reflection was that there were moments where I could sense this mostly technical audience realising the value of design (eg, start with and understand users’ needs) and product management (eg the session on treating your platform as a product) that need to be blended in a multi-disciplinary way.
It was a fantastic conference!