We spoke to Henny Portman to discover insights into modern organizational dynamics from the viewpoint of project management, programme management, and portfolio management.

Deployment pipelines can really help Stream-aligned teams to deliver software changes independently:

1. Deployment pipelines can help to reinforce an independent flow of change for a Stream-aligned team. Don’t forget to enable rapid feedback via telemetry!

2. Define the endpoints external to the team - these represent the “outside world” from team perspective. These external endpoints should be outside or at the domain boundary.

3. There can be huge value in managing your deployment pipeline “as a Service or as a proper product, with product management approaches.

I recently joined Mike Kavis of Deloitte on his OnCloud podcast to talk about team communication for effective software delivery. We covered the original DevOps Topologies patterns and how these have been used in industry, and then talked about what’s in the book Team Topologies: well-defined team types, what we mean by a modern platform, team interaction modes, clear responsibility boundaries, DevEx, and using difficulties in team interactions as ‘signals’ to the organization that something is missing or misplaced. We also talked about moving beyond the Spotify model - success in software delivery is not just about team structures but about how teams interact and what kind of relationships they create, sustain, and evolve.

The DevOps Institute has published the Enterprise DevOps Skills Report 2019 covering the in-demand skills for software development in enterprises around the world.

The original DevOps Team Topologies - which ultimately led to our Team Topologies book - are mentioned in the report in the context of different kinds of teams to help make DevOps work.

The book Team Topologies has been 5 or 6 years in the making. How did we (Manuel and I) come to write to book and why?

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In our travels around the world helping organizations with software delivery practices, we noticed that organizations needed guidance on how to evolve team interactions. We also saw that in many organizations the boundaries between teams are very unclear: people were asking “why are we spending so much time working with that other team?” or “why is this service so difficult to use?” - very often there was little clarity about the purpose and duration of team-to-team interactions.