Why are so many organizations stuck in the "middle" of DevOps evolution? What's preventing them from achieving higher levels of organizational performance despite all the automation, tooling, and good practices in place? Puppet's State of DevOps Report 2021 provides important research-based clues to answer these questions, supported by the patterns and recommendations in Team Topologies. In this talk we cover the self-imposed limitations of blindly following some “myths” around DevOps. Almost 80% of organizations are stuck in the "frozen middle" of DevOps evolution because of lack of organizational sensemaking abilities. The margin for growth for these organizations is tremendous, but they need to think beyond technical capabilities to unlock the potential of their teams to deliver with more autonomy and a sense of purpose. The data shows that Team Topologies provides the necessary organizational and team interaction patterns that help organizations achieve performance metrics such as delivering a new customer change request to live in under one hour, or diagnosing and recovering from a serious issue in production in under an hour. Get the State of DevOps Report 2021 here: https://puppet.com/resources/report/2021-state-of-devops-report To learn more about Team Topologies: https://teamtopologies.com/learn https://academy.teamtopologies.com

1. TeamTopologies.com
@TeamTopologies
Frozen DevOps?
Team Topologies
Comes to the Rescue!
Manuel Pais
co-author of Team Topologies
19 27 Jan 2022 - DevSecOps - London Gathering
@manupaisable

2. Team Topologies
5
Organizing business and
technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press (2019)
teamtopologies.com/book

3. “innovative tools and concepts for
structuring the next generation
digital operating model”
Charles T. Betz,
Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
6

4. 8
DevOps

5. 9
https://puppet.com/resources/report/2021-state-of-devops-report

6. 10

7. 11

8. 12

9. 13
“provides evidence that the
recommendations in Team
Topologies help to orient an
organization towards becoming
more highly evolved”

10. Why are so many
organizations frozen
in the DevOps middle?
14

11. 15
We have Cloud, CI/CD,
SRE & Observability

12. 16
“Organizations should not expect to
become highly evolved just because
they use cloud and automation…
They are held back by organizational
structure and dynamics”

13. ⏳ ⏳
Blocking
Non-
Blocking
Cloud Infra Deploy

14. 18

15. “Devops was always as much about
org structure and incentives as any of
the technical details.”
- Andrew Clay Shafer
19

16. 20
Organizations where teams have
strong identities that are well
understood, with clearly defined
responsibilities, are far more likely to
be higher performing

17. 21

18. We have teams with a
clear mission and purpose
that is understood by
other teams
22
High evol

19. 23
We welcome
collaboration

20. 24
“Collaboration is expensive
[for real-time work]…
it’s not scalable or repeatable. ”

21. 25

22. 26

23. 27

24. 28
“if you simply adopt the team types,
you’re missing one of the key
takeaways... which is paying attention
and being deliberate about teams’
setup and their desired interaction”

25. We welcome purposeful
interactions that have
clear goals and duration
29
High evol

26. 30
We have fully autonomous
“build & run” teams

27. 31
“If cognitive load is left “unbounded”
then… performance metrics will be
negatively affected, preventing teams
from evolving to higher levels”

28. 32

29. “How do real-world organizations
structure themselves for DevOps?
You can’t just put everyone on a single,
silo-less team”
- Jeff Sussna
33

30. 34
A valuable platform
reduces the cognitive load
of stream-aligned teams.

31. “Cognitive load is the total
amount of mental effort
being used in the working
memory”
- John Sweller
35

32. Intrinsic (skills)
Extraneous (mechanism)
Germane (domain focus)
36

33. Intrinsic
Extraneous
Germane
37
“How do I
deploy this
app,
again?”

34. (Intrinsic)
] Extraneous [
Germane
38

35. 39
extraneous cognitive load
for stream-aligned teams
germane cognitive load
for platform teams
→

36. 40

37. 41

38. 42
“Highly evolved firms use a
combination of stream-aligned
and platform teams as the
most effective way to
manage cognitive load at scale”

39. We have an ecosystem of
loosely coupled teams that
promotes fast flow &
continuous learning
43
High evol

40. 44
We have a platform team
that solves common
problems for teams

41. 45
“the existence of a platform team
does not inherently unlock
higher evolution DevOps”

42. “A digital platform is a foundation of
self-service APIs, tools, services,
knowledge and support which are
arranged as a compelling internal
product.”
– Evan Bottcher, 2018
46
Source: https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html

43. 47
“Successful platform teams treat
their platform as a product. They
strive to create a compelling value
proposition for application teams”

44. But what is
“Platform as a Product”?
48

45. 49
A platform as a product is
optional to use - no team is
forced to use the platform

46. “Any time standards, practices,
processes, frameworks, or
architectures become a mandate, I’ve
seen little to no adoption.”
- Courtney Kissler
50

47. 51
A platform as a product is
carefully designed and
curated for its customers

48. 52
A platform as a product
evolves to take advantage
of technology changes

49. 53
A platform as a product
uses modern product
management & follows
the adoption lifecycle

50. 54
Happier users (engineers)
No technology bloat
Designed to evolve

51. 55
“[Highly evolved platform teams]
understand their internal customers
and offer a curated set of
technologies for infrastructure and
development capabilities”

52. 56

53. We treat the platform as a
product, a curated
experience for our users
57
High evol

54. 59
“Success at scale requires optimizing
not for the individual, and not for the
team, but for the wider organization -
the “team of teams”.
Highly evolved organizations have
discovered the patterns that work
well for a fast flow of change”

55. Resources
60
teamtopologies.com/resources
(links, slides, video)
teamtopologies.com/examples
(uSwitch, WealthWizards & more)

56. academy.teamtopologies.com

57. 2h30 course focusing on modern platform as a product practices
○ Platform Value
○ Platform Customers
○ Platform Experience
○ Platform Adoption Cycle
Target audience: everyone involved in platform engineering
TT25 - Platform as a Product
62

58. Platform Bundle (15% OFF)

59. 64
Manuel Pais
FlowOnRails
Twitter: @manupaisable
LinkedIn: manuelpais
Matthew Skelton
Conflux
Twitter: @matthewpskelton
LinkedIn: matthewskelton
Copyright © Conflux Digital Ltd and FlowOnRails 2018-2022. All rights reserved.
teamtopologies.com