Nimble scaling: LHV Bank accelerates value flow and strategic alignment through Team Topologies

LHV Bank engaged with Conflux to adopt Team Topologies, resolving structural complexity by aligning product and engineering functions to value streams for accelerated delivery and continuous organizational evolution.

LHV office, London, United Kingdom

LHV Bank’s UK launch and rapid expansion created structural complexity, requiring coordination among multiple teams for new-feature delivery.

LHV Bank engaged Conflux to guide the adoption of Team Topologies principles within their specific context, shifting team focus from capability to value stream stewardship. This new structure aligns product and engineering functions with key business segments, establishing a foundation for continuous organizational evolution and enabling LHV to become a thriving organization, delivering at speed.

Key Takeaways:

• Value stream alignment enables scaling without linear staff increases

• Reduced cognitive load improves team focus and delivery efficiency

• Aligning engineering costs to value streams improves financial clarity

• Automating compliance guardrails provides competitive advantage

• Active Knowledge Diffusion (AKD) eliminates duplication and accelerates innovation

• Cross-functional alignment accelerates strategic collaboration and innovation

LHV Bank, building on its heritage as an Estonian household name, operationalized its UK banking institution in 2022. This growth included the acquisition of a lending business and the launch of a direct-to-consumer retail proposition in late 2024. The organization had seen efficiency as a defining strength, priding itself on achieving outsized outcomes with limited resources.

Although LHV maintained a culture characterized by trust, empowerment, and a focus on outcomes, rapid growth increased complexity, leading to higher coordination costs.

"The way our teams grew was very organic, adding new teams as and when we needed them, but I was starting to feel a lot of friction in delivering the retail product because now, many teams were involved. Want to build a new feature? OK, we need to bring four teams into the fold."

— Macs Dickinson, Director of Engineering, LHV Bank

Resolving structural conflict and excessive cognitive load

LHV faced a typical scaling challenge in which organizational structure began to inhibit the flow of value. Seeking insight and guidance from Conflux, LHV presented two primary concerns for resolution: scaling without adding significant staff, and managing overwhelming cognitive load.

The previous model relied on capability-based teams (web, mobile, backend), which led to a centralized backend team owning an excessive number of domains. This high cognitive burden blocked clear ownership and efficiency. LHV recognized that implementing changes without context-specific guidance could require them to potentially triple their workforce, which was not feasible or strategic.

"I’ve used the Team Topologies approach before, so we thought, 'we could do this ourselves.’ We couldn’t decide whether to focus on how change runs through our different business lines or on a product-by-product basis. Different viewpoints across the business led to different preferences, so we thought, let’s stop trying to solve this ourselves. We knew we had the answers within the company, but we needed someone to help guide us through the process.”

— Macs Dickinson, Director of Engineering, LHV Bank

“If you’ve already got things like trust, empowerment, good practices, ways of working, and engagement within the organization, then that’s a great place to start. At that point, outside expertise on Team Topologies practices can provide the perspectives you need to navigate complex decisions. Some of these techniques work best when that strong culture of empowerment and trust is already in place.” 

— Matthew Skelton, CEO/CTO of Conflux, co-author of Team Topologies

Finding effective product and service boundaries using Independent Service Heuristics (ISH)

LHV team, London, United Kingdom

Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) were used to identify capabilities that were viable as independent entities, establishing internal boundaries that enable future evolution, such as providing these services as products to external consumers.

Analysis of LHV’s core domains helped the organization determine which systems provided differentiating value and which services could be outsourced or acquired commercially through SaaS investments.

"A key question was, ‘Is this thing that we're building part of our core obsession?’ If it isn't, then we should let someone else obsess about that. Let's pull in a partner, or just buy a SaaS solution".

— Macs Dickinson, Director of Engineering, LHV Bank

LHV leveraged Team Topologies principles to identify optimal value streams and define clear boundaries around them. The resulting organizational design changes created clear flows of value, aligning product and engineering teams with commercial and sales teams across LHV’s retail, banking services, and lending business segments, providing immediate benefits for delivery speed while maintaining flexibility for future changes. Stewardship of shared services was awarded to the segment teams that were the primary consumers, with the clear understanding that these services would be moved to dedicated platform teams once business volume justified the change.

Enhanced strategic alignment and financial traceability

Six months into the transformation, LHV Bank realized substantial benefits driven by empowered teams and service stewardship.

One notable outcome was the acceleration of strategic alignment. Bringing product, engineering, and commercial leaders together had resulted in enhanced, focused collaboration. 

"There are things born from ideas that wouldn't have come up without that collaboration. Previously, we had so many good ideas happening in isolation, and now those conversations are happening together".

— Macs Dickinson, Director of Engineering, LHV Bank

Alignment also led to improved financial traceability. Aligning engineering costs directly to revenue streams simplified cost tracking, providing a clear picture of profitability by segment. Previously, a single engineering cost was spread across the organization, making it extremely difficult to track. 

The foundational work of defining clear boundaries through Team Topologies principles resulted in a ‘register of services’, providing a map for sustainable evolution. By defining clear boundaries around value streams, LHV developed a tool to guide future team structure and platform creation in line with scaling.

"The register provides the necessary context to make educated decisions about future investment. If LHV observes that "volume's growing here, then we know that will form a new team over there".

— Macs Dickinson, Director of Engineering, LHV Bank

Rethinking compliance to enable value flow

LHV team, London, United Kingdom

LHV Bank continues to invest in its ability to release and validate value, and this organizational mindset extends to regulatory challenges. Recognizing the need for a ‘Minimum Compliant Product’ (MCP) as a foundational standard that must be met before defining a broader product scope or Minimum Viable Product (MVP), LHV aims to position compliance as an enabler rather than a blocker to value flow. The definitive nature of compliance makes it perfect for codification into automated guardrails. LHV’s guardrails are a technical manifestation of risk management, working alongside three strong lines of defence; risk ownership sits in the business as the 1st line of defence (1LoD), stewardship of the product sits in the 2LoD, and independent assurance provided by Internal Audit serves as the 3LoD.

"If you focus on your ability to release and validate value, it becomes much easier to be nimble and to pivot".

— Macs Dickinson, Director of Engineering, LHV Bank

By involving internal stakeholders early in the development lifecycle, LHV ensures that potential regulatory challenges, licensing needs, or communication requirements with regulators are understood from the outset. This places automated controls within the delivery pipeline, alongside LHV’s existing three lines of defence, solving complex compliance problems nimbly, and provides LHV with a potential market advantage.

To bolster this, LHV plans to leverage enabling teams, inspired by changes made at ING Bank, to curate and share compliance practices and knowledge across the organization. LHV’s enabling teams would focus on complex, rapidly evolving areas such as AI tooling, helping build organizational capability, and reducing wasteful duplication of discovery work.

“By making existing practice visible, teams can avoid unnecessary discovery work, choosing instead to pull from what another team has already proven is a good way of doing things.”

— Matthew Skelton, CEO/CTO of Conflux, co-author of Team Topologies

Drive engagement and accelerate innovation with Active Knowledge Diffusion (AKD)

As they continue to scale, LHV plans to formalize knowledge sharing to avoid duplication of effort and to spread knowledge, best practices, and innovations across organizational boundaries. These structures are particularly crucial in contexts where firm team boundaries are necessary for fast flow. Having ‘ground-up’ alignment enables nimble problem solving and provides market advantage, linking internal engineering success to external business opportunities.

“We have a lot of pockets of innovation, so creating visibility is key. It’s often not the successful experiments you need to see the most; you want the unsuccessful experiments too, so that when you’re working, you can ask ‘Have things changed? Could I save myself a little bit of time?’ We’ve got a good process in place for how we run experiments, record the outcomes, and then share that knowledge. That works really well.”

— Macs Dickinson, Director of Engineering, LHV Bank

Active Knowledge Diffusion

Implementing AKD can require a culture shift from knowledge hoarding to knowledge sharing. It also demands time and resources, which can be difficult to justify if your organization is currently focused solely on short-term deliverables. However, the benefits of effective AKD are substantial, and organizations with a strong approach to AKD can expect:

• Faster problem-solving and rapid solution adoption organization-wide

• Enhanced innovation through cross-pollinating ideas from different domains 

• Improved employee engagement and retention via learning and recognition

AKD also plays a crucial role in maintaining organizational agility; rapid knowledge diffusion enables your organization to adapt more quickly and cohesively. 

LHV’s path to empowered excellence

LHV Bank is committed to ongoing evolution, and enabling adaptability is essential for LHV to achieve scale in revenue and impact. By intentionally fostering a structure that aligns product, engineering, and commercial functions, LHV has accelerated collaboration and reduced time-to-value. Through alignment and designing for cognitive load, they have built a truly adaptable organization, poised for empowered excellence.

LHV team, London, United Kingdom

Recommendations for sustained growth:

• Codify compliance as guardrails: Automate compliance requirements into guardrails within delivery pipelines, speeding up delivery without the concerns of non-compliance.

• Leverage enabling teams and Active Knowledge Diffusion (AKD): Use enabling teams to enhance the adoption of AI tools, and formalize AKD practices for accelerated knowledge sharing and reduced effort duplication.

• Embrace continuous evolution: Maintain the mindset that organizational change is an ongoing evolution, using structural frictions such as rising cognitive load as a signal for necessary boundary changes and team redesign.
  

“It's clear to me, working with LHV, that the teams, and particularly their culture, trust, empowerment, good practices, ways of working, energy, interest, and commitment to getting things done are there. It’s a great place to start; many of these techniques work best when there's that strong culture of empowerment and trust in place already.”

— Matthew Skelton, CEO/CTO of Conflux, co-author of Team Topologies

Looking to achieve speed at scale?

Start your journey to empowered excellence with Conflux.

Whether you're seeking clarity on your approach or support with a more comprehensive transformation, Conflux supports organizations through four engagement types:

• Assessments & expert sense-checks: for organizations seeking clarity on their approach

• Workshops & training: for leadership teams building fast flow capabilities

• Leadership ‘right-hand’ support: for individuals navigating organizational change

• Driving transformations: for teams and organizations ready for comprehensive chang

Book your discovery call today to discuss your organization's specific challenges and how our proven approach can help you achieve measurable improvements.

Empowering enterprise evolution: how Conflux sowed the seeds of Telenet's whole-organization transformation

Through a series of workshops and facilitated sessions, Conflux empowered Telenet with Team Topologies principles and practices, inspiring a complete reimagining of its operating model.

Telenet office, Mechelen, Belgium

Responding to Telenet's challenges with the Spotify model, Conflux shared decision heuristics and architectural concepts based on Team Topologies that inspired Telenet's leadership. Building on these foundations, Telenet developed its own innovative operating model tailored to its specific context and needs.

The transformation delivered significant benefits across the organization:

• Complete elimination of the traditional business-IT divide through embedded technology capabilities in customer-focused tribes.

• Significantly fewer dependencies between teams, resulting in faster delivery of value to customers.

• Enhanced organizational adaptability, capable of evolving in response to changing market conditions.

Today, Telenet stands as a thriving organization delivering at speed, capable of continuous adaptation while providing greater value to its customers.

"We realized that if we were going to set ourselves up for growth, we needed to rethink our operating model" — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

Telenet’s journey towards fast flow

Telenet is a leading Belgian telecom company and part of the Liberty Global group. Serving over 3 million customers with mobile, fixed, and media products, Telenet employs approximately 3,500 people and generates around €3 billion in annual revenue.

The ‘Spotify Model’ Image - Kniberg & Ivarsson, 2012

In 2018, Telenet adopted the Spotify Agile operating model. After two years, teams were experiencing significant challenges to value flow despite initial benefits. Structural friction and complex interdependencies between teams hindered true business agility.

The ‘Spotify Model’; an Agile implementation made famous as the operating model in use at Spotify, and adopted by thousands of organizations worldwide. Telenet adopted the model, believing that teams could manage away complex interdependencies themselves, but as these proved too complex, a more bespoke operating model was required.

Challenges to flow with Agile

Telenet team, Mechelen, Belgium

While Telenet's Agile implementation brought benefits in terms of transparency and collaboration, the organization was experiencing significant structural frictions:

• Business and IT domains remained in distinct silos with misaligned priorities

• Teams faced high cognitive load, navigating complex interdependencies

• Even simple changes required coordination across 30+ teams

"We had lots of teams with lots of interdependencies, and to get anything produced took a hell of a long time, and on many fronts, we weren't meeting what we'd set out to achieve with this transformation." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

With Telenet focused on becoming a truly digital, data-driven company, and with structural frictions becoming increasingly problematic, the organization needed a more fundamental transformation to achieve true business agility.

Conflux's approach to empowerment

Led by Matthew Skelton, CEO/CTO of Conflux and co-author of Team Topologies, Conflux approached Telenet's transformation through guided discovery workshops rather than prescribing rigid frameworks. The workshops began with identifying blockers, mapping value streams, and finally reimagining roles and capabilities.

Conflux emphasized the importance of team involvement in organizational design decisions, and that effective boundaries emerge from the teams performing the work. This ground-up approach became central to Telenet's transformation journey.

The workshops challenged Telenet to examine its organization through four key lenses:

Software sizing and cognitive load: Conflux led Telenet to consider team cognitive load as a primary design criterion, revealing how scattered, complex application landscapes created barriers to flow. This principle extended beyond team design to procurement decisions, ensuring teams weren't overwhelmed by numerous application stacks.

Conway's Law as a design tool: When exploring Conway's Law, Conflux advised that bringing work to existing teams, rather than reforming teams, proactively applies this principle. This guided Telenet's thinking about organizational design, particularly in forming teams around customer journeys.

Team interaction patterns: Introducing explicit interaction modes (Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, Facilitating) helped Telenet reconceptualize team relationships beyond reporting lines. This provided a vocabulary for designing healthier team dynamics, particularly for platform teams.

Triggers for evolution: Conflux established a foundation for continuous sensing and adaptation by framing awkward interactions as signals for boundary changes. Telenet’s leadership moved from seeing their organization as a fixed structure to viewing it as a continuously evolving system.

"Having that system lens and having leadership be willing to take and use that system lens really makes a difference." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

Team Topologies across the organization

Following Conflux's engagement, Telenet established a small task force* to explore how Team Topologies principles could be applied holistically across the organization.

Telenet’s transformation task force map their approach to organizational redesign, coming to the conclusion that a system-first approach was needed to address particular challenges in terms of organization structure. Image - "Barking up the Wrong Tree: Realizing the Agile Paradigm Shift at Telenet" Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit 2023. Telenet

"We parked the teams side of things, and then together with the [task force] team, we said let's take a step back and let's look at how we're organized as a company as a whole, and see if we can apply some of the team-level ideas, but elevate them to an Enterprise level." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

The task force validated their observations through concrete use cases, particularly in e-commerce, where interdependencies were especially problematic. They identified that domain boundaries were established around tasks rather than business capabilities, resulting in high coordination costs.

Building on Team Topologies principles, the task force developed a modular architecture based on three key tribe archetypes:

Customer tribes: organized around a single customer mission, empowered with all capabilities needed to achieve that mission.

Platform/Service tribes: building and managing common platforms used by internal customers.

Enterprise tribes: driving horizontal collaboration and alignment across the organization.

This architecture applied team-first thinking and interaction patterns at the enterprise level, creating a truly modular organization where tribes functioned as 'micro-enterprises' with clear missions.

Eliminating the traditional business-IT divide

Telenet's new operating model represented a significant departure from their original structure.

Telenet's new operating model: Customer tribes (yellow), Platform/Service tribes (blue), and Enterprise tribes (red), all geared to empower teams in providing customer value, reorienting the whole organization towards the customer. Image - Telenet, 2023

“We own our products; there's no finger-pointing. We own the thing end-to-end." — Johan Morel, VP Billing Experience tribe, Telenet

Customer tribes now own everything from strategy to operations. For example, the Billing Experience tribe is responsible for all billing-related activities within Telenet. This end-to-end ownership reduces handoffs and accelerates delivery.

Platform/Service tribes provide services consumed by other tribes. Using a constrained menu of platform offerings, customer tribes pull curated services as needed, rather than pushing new requirements. 

Enterprise tribes enable collaboration without imposing direct control, reimagining business functions such as Finance and Strategy as enabling services rather than controlling entities.

A key aspect was the absence of a traditional CIO function, with technology capabilities federated across the organization. Each Customer tribe became responsible for its full software development lifecycle, firmly aligning technology with business needs.

The transformation required significant leadership mindset shifts from managing teams to owning customer outputs, managing projects to partnering across boundaries, and becoming active architects of the operating model.

The impact of Team Topologies thinking

"Our tribes and teams are equipped to keep sensing the health of their team boundaries, and to fluidly adapt where their context requires it." — John Porter, CEO, Telenet

Holistically applying Team Topologies principles delivered substantial benefits:

Tribes empowered by technology: By embedding IT capabilities within Customer tribes, teams became truly cross-functional, leading to more cohesive solutions and faster decision-making.

Reduced coordination costs: Clearer team boundaries significantly decreased cross-team dependencies. 

Enhanced flow of value: Teams with end-to-end capabilities deliver more quickly and with higher quality, reducing dependencies and waiting times.

Increased adaptability: The modular architecture enables easier evolution in response to changing requirements. 

Greater employee engagement: Teams with clear missions and appropriate autonomy report higher satisfaction. 

"In this new model, people can see the value they bring to the organisation" — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

An empowerment approach to organizational transformation

Telenet team, Mechelen, Belgium

Providing Telenet with Team Topologies principles through targeted workshops ignited a transformation that extended far beyond Conflux's initial engagement.

Unlike the Spotify model, which provided a more rigid template, Team Topologies offered Telenet an approach that could evolve with changing conditions. This shift to developing context-specific organizational patterns empowered Telenet to create a sustainable approach to continuous improvement.

"It's my firm belief that if you do things on a program basis, then it doesn't work anymore, so it needs to be embedded in the fabric of your organization." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

Telenet's journey showcases how thoughtful adoption of Team Topologies principles transforms business-IT alignment from aspiration to structural reality. Rather than bridging silos through governance, reorganizing boundaries around customer value streams creates natural alignment, where technology becomes an inherent capability of business teams rather than a separate function requiring coordination.

Book your discovery call today to discuss your organization's specific challenges and how our proven approach can help you achieve measurable improvements.

Thank you to Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet for sharing her insights.

*The task force included consultants from Xebia, particularly João Rosa (now part of the Conflux network), who worked closely with Barbara Arnst to translate Team Topologies principles to the enterprise level.

A data-driven approach to fast flow using Team Topologies principles at EBSCO

EBSCO Information Services, a leading provider of research databases, leveraged Team Topologies with Conflux's support to optimize its organizational dynamics for software delivery.

EBSCO operational improvements:

• $9.1M recurring annual cost reduction

• 26% faster feature delivery

• Dependency-related blockers decreased by 45%

• Repeatable enterprise capability playbook

• Significantly higher team satisfaction

After seven years of using SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), EBSCO’s existing ART (Agile Release Train) structure was experiencing several critical challenges in delivering value efficiently. 

A restructure of ARTs to better accommodate legacy and emerging value streams was needed. As the restructure would be implemented using Team Topologies principles and practices, EBSCO enlisted Conflux, a leading Team Topologies Solutions Partner, to guide them through the implementation.

Restructuring using Team Topologies principles enabled significant improvements in EBSCO's speed, autonomy, and efficiency. Feature output increased by 25%, unlocking an additional $9M annually. EBSCO also discovered a renewed awareness of its value and now has a repeatable playbook for future enterprise capabilities and new platform plays.

Re-architecting teams and systems for flow

After seven years with SAFe, EBSCO's ART structure no longer supported the organization's desired flow. The challenges included:

Ownership challenges: Teams lacked end-to-end ownership of value streams

Alignment issues: Managing too many dependencies across boundaries

Delivery speed: Existing structures limited the desired flow of value

Cognitive load: Teams and leadership faced excessive cognitive burden

Excessive WIP: Work in Progress levels complicated delivery effectiveness

"At first, I was skeptical that reorganizing the teams would have any significant benefit. It was hard to imagine there would be any measurable difference. However, once the Team Topologies work had completed, my development managers reported that they felt they had much less cognitive load and there was an increase in their job satisfaction." — Mike Gunning, SVP of Development, EBSCO IS

Catalyzing decision-making through Team Topologies

Conflux guided EBSCO through discovery sessions to map team architecture and value streams. Using Independent Service Heuristics (ISH), they identified optimal value streams for team alignment.

Effective implementation of Team Topologies requires self-awareness at multiple organizational levels, which was very evident at EBSCO. This self-awareness is fundamental to understanding how boundaries can be built around value streams to enable flow.

"EBSCO's relative cultural maturity positioned the organization well for the Team Topologies approach." — Matthew Skelton, CEO/CTO of Conflux and co-author of Team Topologies

From ‘Ownership’ to ‘Stewardship’

In the Team Topologies approach, emphasizing ‘stewardship’ rather than simple ‘ownership’ of services signifies a critical shift in thinking about team responsibilities.

Traditional ownership models sometimes create territorial behaviors, while stewardship emphasizes ongoing care and evolution of services. Establishing clear responsibilities for services and applications was essential to EBSCO's transformation journey.

Stream-aligned teams drive value flow

The transformation delivered substantial financial benefits over the initial two-year period:

• $9.1M in cost savings

• 62% ROI with payback in just 1.2 years

• 197 additional features delivered

EBSCO's new model connected capabilities, applications, and teams around distinct value offerings. This optimized structure enabled end-to-end domain stewardship and reduced handoffs, removing delivery friction.

"Becoming a full-stack development team has benefitted my team in so many ways. We're avoiding dependencies on other teams, triaging a wider range of defects, and providing both API and UI focused teammates a better understanding of where their data comes from." — Craig Spara, Senior Software Engineer, EBSCO IS.

Team Topologies enables organizational transformation for fast flow

"One key takeaway is that we now have the tools to develop and maintain a consistent approach. If we need to reorganize or redesign into new enterprise capabilities or a new platform play, we have the playbook." — Nicole Casellini, VP Lean Enterprise Office, EBSCO IS

EBSCO now has a sustainable improvement model based on five key principles:

Empowering teams via technology – Creating an environment where teams can deliver value autonomously

Ongoing stewardship over project completion – Moving from ‘build and move on’ to continuous care

Sociotechnical systems thinking – Aligning human and technical elements

Fast flow through clear boundaries – Enabling rapid delivery by defining team interfaces

Cognitive load management – Ensuring teams can effectively maintain and evolve services

Download the full EBSCO case study

Discover the full story of EBSCO's Team Topologies transformation:

• Detailed methodology and implementation approach

• Enterprise domain evolution through capability affinity grouping

• Platform team evolution and the "restaurant menu” approach

• ROI breakdown and measurement frameworks

• And much more...

Thank you to Nicole Casellini, VP Lean Enterprise Office - EBSCO Information Services, Scott Cummins, SVP Office of CIO - EBSCO Information Services, and Steven Whitaker Principal Enterprise Architect - EBSCO Information Services for sharing their insights.

Book your discovery call today to discuss your organization's specific challenges and how our proven approach can help you achieve measurable improvements.

Proemion optimizes team and system boundaries for flow with CodeScene and Conflux

How IoT leader Proemion used CodeScene and guidance from Conflux to evolve healthy team and system boundaries for flow.

Proemion is the leading telematics platform provider for OEMs, offering a seamless integration of hardware, software, and connectivity, ensuring continuous business success for its customers. With a fully integrated telematics stack providing platform monitoring, analysis, prediction, remote diagnostic, and access capabilities, Proemion makes it easy for businesses to manage fleets and boost efficiency. After joining Battery Ventures in 2022, Proemion expanded in 2024 by acquiring Trendminer, a company specializing in industrial process and asset monitoring.

At Proemion, around 60 engineers across 10 teams are continually working on generating, collecting, and presenting key operational data via their flagship DataPortal product, and these teams are growing with customer demand. Umberto Nicoletti, Head of R&D at Proemion, realized that to support the company’s continued sustainable growth of their software engineering capability, it would need to adopt principles and practices informed by fast flow, such as Team Topologies. 

In particular, it became clear that as the number of engineers increased, it was vital to establish good boundaries for flow, enabling teams to work with empowered autonomy whilst still contributing effectively to the whole solution. In 2024, after watching a talk from Conflux CEO, Matthew Skelton on untangling software delivery, Proemion began to use CodeScene to assess codebase health. 

“I decided to trial CodeScene after having seen it recommended in the ‘untangling’ presentation by Matthew Skelton at the DORA community in 2023”, said Nicoletti. He needed to understand why some teams were struggling with delivery compared to others. Were some teams blocked more often, were delays due to code quality, or some other problem? Nicoletti commented, “A qualitative assessment with the respective Team Leads suggested that there was room for improvement, however, we could not pinpoint exactly what the obstacles were.”

Initially, Nicoletti used the concept of counting “blocking waits” to assess team independence (as outlined in Matthew Skelton’s talk), however, their findings were counterintuitive: the team with the highest delivery performance reported the most blocking waits. After some discussion, Nicoletti realized that a high-maturity team is typically more aware of its surroundings and limitations, and more readily able to report blockers as a result.

When they used CodeScene to compare the context of different teams, it provided clarity and pinpointed the problems faced by the lower-performing team. “CodeScene on the other hand told a story that fit my perception and that of the team lead perfectly”, said Nicoletti. “CodeScene showed us that the underperforming team exhibited a cluster of challenges: it was the only team with decreasing code quality, a few significant refactoring hotspots, knowledge loss due to staff leaving, and had low team effectiveness (we had scaled up the team size but failed to reap the full benefits of it).”  

CodeScene helped the leadership at Proemion identify the causes of lower team performance around software delivery and provided actionable recommendations for addressing the problems, such as refactoring steps, hotspot analysis, and code health trends. 

Using team analysis in CodeScene to map to Team Topologies principles

CodeScene provides powerful capabilities to detect and visualize team boundaries based on the patterns of activity in code repositories, drawing on concepts explored in the book ‘Team Topologies’, co-authored by Conflux CEO, Matthew Skelton. Any mismatches between the software architecture and the team architecture are easy to spot using CodeScene, via its team dynamics features. 

Nicoletti used these features to assess the effectiveness of team boundaries at Proemion, in particular looking for cross-team dependencies. The analysis showed that a change from a waterfall to a stream-aligned model 18 months before had been successful in minimizing cross-team dependencies. “CodeScene gave us confidence that we did not have a major problem with blocking waits, due to the earlier reorganization inspired by Team Topologies”, said Nicoletti. 

CodeScene’s team alignment explorer demonstrates that the model change from waterfall to stream-aligned reduced the communication channels outside of the team.

In this case, the circle on the team on the left-hand side represents an individual who moved from the bottom right team to the left, and Codescene correctly portrays the strong ties to their former team. 

Comparing CodeScene to other code quality tools (like SonarCloud)

Led by Nicoletti, the engineering team at Proemion also used CodeScene alongside SonarCloud for a “multi-level” approach to code quality assessment.

“We found that CodeScene and SonarCloud complement each other when it comes to assessing codebase health”, said Nicoletti. “CodeScene focuses on how code quality affects team dynamics (and vice-versa), whereas SonarCloud focuses on ‘single line’ code quality, without any real context about the social or organizational aspects. With that in mind, they are both helpful, because SonarCloud helps with static code analysis on each single change and is therefore useful for the developers in their day-to-day work.” 

CodeScene’s dashboard shows steadily increasing code quality and team alignment. This data matches the perceived team(s) performance as they work on the codebase that has been powering the Proemion telematics platform for over 15 years.

“In contrast, CodeScene’s focus on organizational dynamics is relevant for an audience such as team leads, engineering managers, and CTOs who can influence organizational structure and team boundaries”, explained Nicoletti. “Thanks to CodeScene, we discovered that we’re well set up from a Team Topologies perspective, which helped us to identify that the problem with the lower-performing team seemed to be down to the team not scheduling time to tackle the hotspots. This is something that other tools more or less in the same space (like SonarCloud) fail to capture and show as clearly as CodeScene does.” 

CodeScene provides actionable insights for reducing time-to-value

Thanks to guidance and suggestions from Conflux, the R&D department at Proemion found practical approaches to assessing and remediating lower performance in their software delivery teams. The use of CodeScene for social code analysis was crucial to giving clarity on the nature and location of the problems. 

“CodeScene backs the perceived team performance problems with data and provides actionable next steps”, said Nicoletti. “Codescene excels in revealing the dynamics and factors that affect software delivery performance through clear, actionable diagrams.”

Conflux is a global CodeScene partner. Our dedicated CodeScene success accelerator program delivers measurable results to help your teams adopt and maintain a sustainable fast flow of value.

Visit confluxhq.com/codescene to get started. 

Cloud readiness and flow architectures at iBwave

iBwave provides telecom radio planning software used by telecoms providers around the world. Conflux guided a move to adopt a cloud product mode.

“Thanks again for your work here at iBwave; it was valuable and we all learn a lot from your experience.”

— Sébastien Gagnon, Director Of Software Development at iBwave Solutions Inc.

iBwave is the power behind great in-building wireless experience, enabling billions of end users and devices to connect inside a wide range of venues. As the global industry reference, iBwave software solutions allow for smarter planning, design and deployment of any wireless network project regardless of size, complexity or technology.

In 2020, iBwave began to move its flagship software product to the cloud to take advantage of massively parallel processing power for 4G/5G network signal calculations.

Conflux helped iBwave to explore and evaluate options during the move to Microsoft Azure:

1. Recommendations for adjustments to the sales and product approaches to better suit a cloud-based SaaS subscription service,

2. Practical options for migrating the software application in stages to the cloud, together with decision heuristics to enable adjustments later on. This included a redesign of the teams based on the book Team Topologies by Conflux founder, Matthew Skelton.

3. Specific practices for modernizing .NET codebases and migrating to to team-sizes services using Continuous Delivery based on the book Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET by Conflux founder, Matthew Skelton.

The work led to a set of operating principles for cloud-based software, a migration path for the existing software product, and practical options for accelerating software delivery.

Screenshot of the flagship iBwave Design software, showing 4G/5G connectivity for a sports stadium.

DevOps and cloud adoption at CDL

CDL is the UK market leader for insurance software. Their practices - aided by Conflux - were featured in the book Team Topologies.

“This was a very team-friendly way of assessing software delivery and it produced useful, actionable recommendations.”

— Andy Rubio, Development Team Leader, CDL

CDL offers powerful solutions enabling insurers to achieve strategic, mass market distribution of their products, while retaining control through insurer hosted rating mechanisms. Combining an ambitious R&D programme with a track record of industry firsts, CDL also works closely with insurers to create next generation insurance products, in tune with the expectations of millennials.

In 2018, CDL began to take steps to accelerate delivery of changes to its widely-used insurance software. Several successful innovation pilots had shown “the art of the possible” and the challenge was then to adopt these pilot practices across the rest of the organization.

Conflux helped CDL to assess its current approaches to planning, building, testing, and operating its software services in three phases:

1. A team-centric assessment of practices for building and running software using DevOps principles

2. A wide-ranging, strategic assessment of practices across all areas of engineering and IT

3. A series of workshops and group sessions focused on inter-team dynamics, Team Topologies principles, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

The work led to increased clarity about the pathway to a cloud-centric operating model, practical steps for decomposing a large monolithic software codebase, and increased engagement from practitioners.

“We engaged Conflux to provide a 2-day DevOps-focused software delivery assessment across six of our software development squads here at CDL. We wanted to get an independent view of what was working well and what needed improvement, and the results were eye-opening for us. After the assessment it was clear that we needed to consider quite significant changes in how the teams are composed, organised and run, plus better definition of our internal and external software services.

The assessment process itself was refreshing to see: the Conflux consultant quickly developed a good rapport with the various teams, putting them at ease and helping them to produce an honest assessment of their practices, skills, capabilities, and frustrations. This was a very team-friendly way of assessing software delivery and it produced useful, actionable recommendations.”

— Andy Rubio, Development Team Leader, CDL

The modern Codeworks building at CDL.

Cloud readiness and fast flow at Publish Interactive

Publish Interactive is the publishing and monetization platform for the research sector. Conflux helped them to adopt fast flow and prepare for cloud-native approaches.

“I think we’ve managed to jump over some of the potential pitfalls in moving to cloud thanks to ... Conflux.”

— Thomas Gibbs, Director of Operations at Publish Interactive

Publish Interactive is the publishing and monetization platform for the research sector. Trusted by 50% of Fortune 500 companies, Publish Interactive has been in continuous development since 2004 and includes several patents for innovative data processing.

In 2018, the Publish Interactive team began to take advantage of the AWS and Azure public cloud platforms for running their software at scale and also for build/test/deployment. Publish Interactive engaged Conflux to help guide and accelerate the adoption of public cloud alongside approaches like Continuous Delivery, DevOps, and SRE.

Conflux provided initial targeted consulting sessions with Publish Interactive staff which helped them to build a high-level plan for adoption of new technologies and approaches. Conflux then ran a Value Stream Mapping workshop to identify blockers in the flow of change from version control to Production, helping to reduce significantly the time taken to prepare new changes for release.

The Publish Interactive staff participated in a full-day workshop run by Conflux covering modern DevOps approaches to software delivery including: a Run Book dialogue sheet exercise to identify gaps in operational readiness, running the Elevation of Privilege card game from Microsoft to recognize security problems, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as an approach to responsive cloud operations, and an exploration of ways to evolve the software to take advantage of cloud technologies.

“The input we’ve had from Conflux has been great. It’s really helped us to develop a clearer picture of where we’re heading with both technology and teams. I think we’ve managed to jump over some of the potential pitfalls in moving to cloud thanks to the sessions from Matthew and the team at Conflux.”

— Thomas Gibbs, Director of Operations at Publish Interactive

Screenshot of the Publish Interactive cross-sell feature.