MATTHEW SKELTON has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. Head of Consulting at Conflux, he specializes in Continuous Delivery, operability and organization design for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software. MANUEL PAIS is an organizational IT consultant and trainer focused on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating flow. Recognized by TechBeacon in 2019 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, he is also coauthor of the book Team Topologies. He helps organizations rethink their approach to software delivery, operations, and support via strategic assessments, practical workshops, and coaching.
"DevOps is great, but how do real-world organizations actually
structure themselves to do it? You can't just put everyone on a
single, silo-less team, all sitting together in one giant open-plan
office and going out to lunch or playing foosball together. Team
Topologies provides a practical set of templates for addressing the
key DevOps question that other guides leave as an exercise for the
student."--Jeff Sussna, CEO, Sussna Associates
The high performing team is the core generator of value in the
modern digital economy. But cultivating and scaling an adaptive
ecosystem of such teams is a too-often elusive goal. In this book,
Skelton and Pais provide innovative tools and concepts for
structuring the next generation digital operating model.
Recommended for CIOs, enterprise architects, and digital product
strategists worldwide.--Charles Betz, Principal Analyst and Global
DevOps Lead, Forrester Research
"Team Topologies provides fresh insights on how to anticipate and
adapt to market and technology changes. To survive, enterprises
need to unlearn existing command and control structures and instead
move authority to leaders with the best information to take action
and respond. This book will help executives and business leaders
focus on the key strategies of high performance teams to
effectively address the needs of today and the evolving landscape
of tomorrow."--Barry O'Reilly, Business Advisor, Entrepreneur,
Author of Unlearn and Co-Author of Lean Enterprise
"I have found Matthew and Manuel's work on patterns and language to
be incredibly valuable in both shaping strategies to transform team
contexts over time across our organization, as well as in helping
business and technology leadership connect with the topics of flow
and continuous delivery."--Richard James
"DevOps Topologies is an outstanding resource for all technical
leaders pushing for modern approaches to effective partnerships
between Development and Operations. It goes beyond high level
explanations of DevOps offering that there are many flavors that a
company may choose to adopt based on a few factors including
maturity, size and product landscape. At Conde Nast International,
this resource was crucial in understanding our current DevOps state
and in defining the vision for our aspirational DevOps operating
model. We were able to navigate around the pitfalls and
organizational anti-patterns as excellently described in the
models. The models themselves proved extremely useful artifacts in
aligning both stakeholders and teams directly involved. Lastly, I
introduced a new function to the business which hadn't existed
before: Site Reliability Engineering. The DevOps Topologies
resource was a primary resource in firstly convincing myself that
we had matured and grown to a point to justify SRE, but also in
articulating to the business stakeholders the strategy for our new
DevOps model. I am extremely pleased that Matthew and Manuel are
growing on the success of the DevOps Topologies website and turning
their further learnings into the far-reaching Team Topologies book
for organization design."--Crystal Hirschorn, VP of Engineering,
Global Strategy and Operations at Conde Nast
"I've long enjoyed learning from Matthew's and Manuel's work, and
have been recommending their content to clients and peers for
several years (in particular, DevOpsTopologies.com). It's great to
see that their wisdom for organizing teams has been collated into a
single book, because as the cliche goes, the hard stuff when
working in an organization is always in relation to the 'soft'
skills (and people and teams). If you're looking for an analysis of
the challenges with the traditional ways of working, and also some
practical guidance on mitigation strategies (e.g., new interaction
modes, reducing cognitive load, and creating appropriate 'Team
APIs'), then this is the book for you!"--Daniel Bryant, Technical
Consultant/Advisor and News Manager at InfoQ
"Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais say 'Team Topologies is meant to
be a functional book'--and it is. It's well constructed and
signposted, based in sound thinking, and challenges readers to
assume, like them, that an organization is a socio-technical system
or ecosystem. From this assumption comes practical suggestions, no
prescriptions, and skill in explaining an approach that provides
for effective tech/human organization design. For anyone in the
tech/organization design field, [Team Topologies is] well worth
reading."--Dr. Naomi Stanford, Organization Design Practitioner,
Teacher, and Author
"Team Topologies makes for a fascinating read as it explores the
symbiotic relationship between teams and the IT architecture they
support. It goes beyond the common approach of static org charts or
self-organizing chaos and shows how to evolve the people system and
IT system together."--Mirco Hering, Global DevOps Lead Accenture
and Author of DevOps for the Modern Enterprise
"There is nothing more fundamental to management than how you
structure your organization and what behaviors you encourage.
Despite this, few have attempted to catalog and analyze the
organizational design patterns of IT organizations going through
Digital, DevOps, and SRE transformations. Skelton and Pais have not
only accepted this bold challenge, but they've also hit the mark by
creating an indispensable and unique resource."--Damon Edwards,
Co-Founder of Rundeck
"When your teams encounter friction and bottlenecks it can be
tempting to throw more people, tooling, and process at the problem.
Your solution likely lies in a new team topology. But what should
that look like? Team Topologies provides a much-needed framework
for evaluating and optimizing team organization for increased flow.
Teams that have the right size, the right boundaries, and the right
level of communication are poised to deliver value to the company
and satisfaction to the team members. Team Topologies combines a
methodical approach with real-world case studies to unlock the full
potential of your tech teams."--Greg Burrell, Senior Reliability
Engineer at Netflix
Team Topologies informs and enriches our understanding of
organizational architecture...it serves as a pragmatic guide
whether forming teams and enabling them to meet their challenges or
helping existing teams become more effective at responsive value
delivery.--Ruth Malan, Architecture Consultant at Bredemeyer
Consulting
"Teams are the fundamental building block of organizations, how
those teams work and the system they operate in are the difference
between average and high performance. I believe this book is a deep
well of information for how you can optimize your organization's
system for your current context."--Jeremy Brown, Director, Red Hap
Open Innovation Labs EMEA
"The Team Topologies book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is
unique. It is going to have a big influence across tech companies.
We need a structured and methodical approach to shaping teams for
continuous delivery instead of copying a few Spotify rituals. This
is the book."--Nick Tune, API Platform Lead, Navico
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