Team Planning
Planning how you organise your teams will have the single biggest impact on your ability to meet your end users needs.
The goal of Senzo Advisory's Team Planning engagement is to understand your organisational objectives, constraints and context. Then collaboratively come up with an organisational and team plan to ensure your Serverless adoption best meets those needs.
What does this actually entail? We have four elements to this service.
Information gathering where we understand your objectives, constraints, and context.
Macro organisational structure plan using the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre
Team structure planning to ensure each team is the right size and shape with the right skills to deliver
Communication strategy to maximise co-ordination and communication across the levels of the organisation.
The expectation is that this is done collaboratively and iteratively, incrementally delivering value through each stage.
Information Gathering
Upfront there is information gathering. Firstly at a functional level, documenting the current state of the organisation and relevant teams. Secondly at a strategic level to understand the objectives that you're trying to meet through a Serverless adoption, the organisational constraints and wider context.
This is not an exhaustive process, we gather enough information to inform our next step. We may revisit this phase if there are gaps in our knowledge to make recommendations. We aim to keep this as simple as possible upfront, so we can get to the next phases quickly.
Macro Organisational Structure
"Any organisation that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure." - Mel Conway (Conway's Law)
Once we understand the context we'll recommend an Inverse Conway Manoeuvre to guide the overall macro organisation of the teams looking to deliver against the organisation objectives. Conway's Law is the observation that the architecture of software systems ends up resembling the organisational architecture of the teams responsible for building it.
The Inverse Conway Manoeuvre leverages Conway's Law to design your organisation responsible for shipping software to resemble the desired architecture of the software.
In practice this means creating teams to ship discrete products and pieces of functionality with little to no dependencies on other teams. By that mandate these teams need to be cross functional.
I highly recommend Martin Fowler's blog on the topic of Conway's Law to understand more
Small Cross Functional Teams
Beyond leveraging Conway's Law to define the macro structure of the organisation, we'll need to create small cross functional teams. One of the great benefits of Serverless architecture is that it moves the majority of the undifferentiated heavy lifting to a platform behind an API, and away from your teams. This enables teams to be smaller, with less inter-team dependencies.
Small teams are incredibly powerful. The Ringelmann effect states that individual members of a team become less productive as the size of the group increases. There are a number of reasons for this, from social loafing, to loss of co-ordination as larger teams need to spend more time co-ordinating.
For the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre to be successful these small teams need to be cross functional and able to deliver discrete capabilities on their own. To do that they need to be cross functional teams, ideally consisting of T-shaped people. T-shaped people are individuals who can do a wide variety of things, but are experts in one. The ideal cross-functional teams consist of overlapping T-shaped people, where they all have the same broad base of knowledge, but are experts in discrete areas.
Based on the information we've gathered in the previous phase, we'll collaboratively create a plan to ensure your teams have the requisite skills. This can consist of reorganising, hiring, training, and a mix of all three. This plan is based on the context specific to your organisation.