Insights on fast flow
How to Build a Culture of Knowledge-Sharing
Knowledge sharing is a strategic organizational practice in which teams come together to exchange expertise and learn from each other. This creates more effective and connected organizations that can deliver value quickly.
The ROI of Fast Flow: Real-World Impact on Enterprise Performance
Leading organizations are seeing remarkable results from adopting fast flow practices and Team Topologies approaches. JP Morgan reduced dependencies by 60% and increased flow velocity by 73% across 7,500 colleagues. LSA's research of 410 companies shows highly aligned organizations grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable.
The impact is significant - just one hour of daily wait time costs a medium-sized organization $8 million annually. Organizations optimizing for flow see benefits across operations, finances, and culture - from reduced dependencies and faster delivery to improved profitability and employee engagement. The evidence is clear: investing in team design, organizational alignment, and flow optimization delivers substantial returns.
The Evolution of DevOps: How Platform Engineering and AI Are Transforming Software Delivery
Software development is a fast-paced industry, and the landscape is constantly shifting. From the early days of throwing code "over the wall" to operations teams, to the DevOps revolution, and now to the era of platform engineering - the journey has been one of continuous improvement and adaptation. Today, we're witnessing another seismic shift as Artificial Intelligence (AI) enters the fray, promising to revolutionize how we approach software delivery and operational excellence.
Reshaping Teams and Aligning to Value Streams with Fast Flow
Reshaping Teams and Aligning to Value Streams with Fast Flow.
From Feature Factory to Customer-Centric Innovation: ABC Glofox's Transformation Journey.
In the competitive world of fitness technology, ABC Fitness’ ABC Glofox, a studio and gym membership management software provider, faced a common challenge for innovative software companies: the risk of becoming a 'feature factory' while losing sight of their main objectives. This is the first in a series of articles exploring how ABC Glofox made the critical shift from feature-driven development to outcome-focused innovation using fast flow.
Change the system, not the person. Why well-being needs to start with organizational change.
Over the past decade, organizations have given increasing attention to employee well-being. Recognising the importance of fostering a healthy, happy and supported workforce, and the obvious benefits to business outcomes, employers are keen to emphasize how employee well-being is a key focus of their organization.
Yet over half of employees believe their employer is guilty of well-being washing and a recent research study by William Fleming Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre concludes that individual well-being interventions have little to no impact. Putting some possibly justifiable cynicism to one side for a moment, what could be causing this gap between intention and impact?
Addressing misconceptions on Psychological Safety to improve performance
Psychological safety is a foundational requirement for organizations seeking fast flow and effective change. We have seen a couple of articles recently that suggest psychological safety could have a downside, so we decided to reflect on the issue.
An article in Fortune in 2023 suggested that performance is improved when everyone is ‘held accountable’ and implied that this was at odds with psychological safety. Another (Hive Learning) suggested that being ‘comfortable’ was the opposite of psychological safety, though it did acknowledge that you could be comfortable with either scenario.
In this article, we review the benefits of psychological safety, why these benefits occur, whether or not there is a downside, and what you should be ‘comfortable’ with.
Key ideas for fast flow and DevOps transformation - from DevOpsDays Oslo 2023
Summary: pay attention to group dynamics for effective transformation
The common theme that emerged from the sessions I attended at DevOpsDays Oslo 2023 is really that structure is not going to save or fix your digital transformation. Instead, we need to pay attention to the group sizes, group interactions, and group experience when using tools.
Social and technical practices for fast flow - insights from Agile Manchester 2023
… it’s actually the sociotechnical aspects of delivering and operating software that are the most crucial, that the social and the technical cannot be easily separated.
This was apparent even in Matthew’s opening keynote when talking about deployment pipelines and how often they mirror the team structure in an organization. “Show me your deployment pipelines and I will predict your team boundaries.”
Optimizing for Fast Flow: Key factors for organizations seeking effective software delivery and team wellbeing
The mini-book answers key questions such as how to structure organizations and teams, how to get the most from all of your team members, and how to identify and remove inhibitors of flow. And there is a detailed section on the relative merits of different models of change. Should there be a central change department, for example?
The financial value of psychological safety in technology organizations
The research from DORA shows that, for technology organizations, psychological safety is a double whammy. An absence of psychological safety will contribute to poor software delivery performance, deployment pain, and employee burnout. On the other hand, the presence of psychological safety will contribute to improved software delivery performance, organizational performance, and job satisfaction. It’s double or quits.
How to optimize for speed and flow - insights from QCon London 2022
My colleague, Matthew Skelton (co-author of the book Team Topologies), was asked to curate a track on the final day of this year’s QCon London conference on the topic of ‘Optimizing for Speed and Flow’. I was fortunate to be able to attend and watch all the talks and panel discussion on this track (and live-tweet from the company account!). In this article, I have shared my key takeaways from the sessions in the track.
Our organizational OS needs an upgrade: why knowledge works needs a new approach
Organizations engaged in knowledge work must recognise that many of their current ways of working are the legacy of a bygone era and are no longer applicable or effective in today’s world. They need to adopt a new approach to how they do their work. Knowledge work requires teamwork and collaboration; it requires that people are engaged and switched on, able to use all their talents and creativity to solve hard and novel problems.
How to transform online meetings into memorable experiences using Liberating Structures
During the last year, staff and partners at Conflux have been changing the experience and outcomes that our customers’ software delivery teams have when they meet online. These meetings might be arranged to have conversations about their work, or consider topics like operability, engineering practices, or Team Topologies. In this article we’ll explain how we’ve been bringing intentional design and participatory methods to the way we convene teams, to transform the results they get when thinking and working together in groups.
Using ideas from ‘Humble Inquiry’ to ask instead of tell
To make it possible for those who are lower down in the organizational hierarchy to feel psychologically safe to speak up when the situation demands that they do, or when asked to do so directly, we need to create good relationships between people - relationships that are built on openness and trust. Schein’s argument is that ‘humble inquiry’ is the method by which such relationships are forged. These relationships need to be created before they’re needed, we need to invest in them upfront so that they are ready when the situation arises.
Psychological Safety: A Tailwind For Success
Sometimes psychological safety is seen as being something ‘soft’, that it’s all about everybody being nice to each other all the time. Yet ‘Sooner Safer Happier’ is a book about business agility aimed at business leaders - leaders whose goal is for their business to succeed and thrive. And one of the key ingredients of such business success is psychological safety.
Making Blameless Post-mortems Work Well
Post-mortems are opportunities to learn and get value from incidents in production - value that we have already paid for upfront; they are opportunities to improve our understanding of our systems, both social and technological.
For our post-mortems to be effective and work well, they need to be blameless - so that we stay curious and ask good questions, and so that people feel safe to speak up. Being blameless really does matter!
Making the most of your people: key takeaways from the book ‘The Fearless Organization’
Psychological safety is about making people feel safe to speak up, enabling and empowering them to make full use of all their talents and creativity at work, and not be silenced by fear. To thrive in today’s complex and fast-moving world, organizations need to make the most of their people; they need them to bring their brains and their voices to work. For that to happen, they first need to create psychological safety.
In her book ‘The Fearless Organization’, Amy Edmondson describes exactly what psychological safety is, the positive benefits it can bring for organizations and for individuals, and gives us a clear framework for how we can start along the road - zig-zagging though it may be! - to create psychological safety in our own workplaces.
If, like me, you’ve heard the term ‘psychological safety’, have wondered what it’s all about and are interested in finding out more, then you should definitely read this book.