Companies are complex systems made up of humans and technological systems in perpetual interaction. “Theses socio-technical” systems are Romain's favorite subject.
Melvin Conway observed that the communication structures of organizations directly influence the design of technical systems produced by those organizations.
In short: the organization chart of the company and the interpersonal relationships across people have more influence than designers and architects!
The principle of an "Inverse Conway Maneuver" is simple: to transform your business at a lower cost, first look at and influence how the teams interact. The rest will follow...
Inspired by the bestseller Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Romain gives some advice on how to put it into practice, reorganize your teams to better respond to the strategic challenges of your company and, at the same time, to design learning organizations where the individuals emancipate.
Romain Vailleux, consultant at OCTO since 2015, is regularly contacted by business leaders who complain about the limits of their information systems:
“My CRM is not omnichannel; our mobile application is late; my API project is going crazy….”
The company is a complex system made up of humans and technological systems bounded by continuous interactions. This “socio-technical” system is twofold:
These two dimensions interact within a single complex system, oscillating around a point of rarely optimal equilibrium. This system actively and valiantly resists any attempt of transformation...
Can you see the problem?
How do we create balanced and durable changes in the socio-technical system embodied by our companies? Within an optimal spending of time and energy?
Since the 1960s, Melvin Conway has also been interested in “socio-technical” systems. The law that bears his name (Conway's Law) reads as follows: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” This law is cited extensively by OCTO consultants who spot these patterns in companies and consistently find that the structure of the company's organisation influences the design of IT architecture and rarely the other way around.
This bold move is to use Conway's Law to indirectly achieve our end goals: to transform your business at a lower cost, modify its communication structures to influence the emergence of optimal architectural designs. The real question to ask is then: what is the right organization to reach a given architectural target?
It is not easy to divide 150 people into several teams. Dunbar's work and other significant numbers come in handy:
Focus on small teams and low cognitive load
Finding the optimal balance between team size and efficiency means positioning the cursor between:
The authors of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow identify four types of teams :
The 4 types of team of the model Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Finally, 3 modes of interaction between teams are proposed in this model:
The 3 modes of interaction of the model Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
The target organization is then designed and assembled like Legos® by successively adding the teams and the appropriate modes of interaction.
New target organization
The organization is designed and assembled step-by-step, taking into account the challenges and constraints of the company:
| #### Issues & constraints | #### Team | #### Mode of interaction |
| Resolve strong dependencies: “The PIM and CMS need to be synchronized very frequently and work in tandem.” | Complicated Subsystem team “Products” | Collaboration |
| Take into account the corporate strategy: "Our core business is to provide a customer experience that reflects the quality and innovation of our products." | Stream aligned teams “Front Web” et “Front Mobile” | Collaboration with Products |
| Support transformation projects: "Omnichannel means making CRM information and OMS services available to all channels." | Complicated Subsystem team “CRM” et “OMS” | X-as-a-service with “Products” |
| Combine rare skills with a skills transmission mission: “We opted for the Xforce solution on several bricks. But experts in the market are few and far between. ” | Enabling team “XForce” | Facilitation |
| Take into account the state of maturity of the application market: “The means of payment are multiplying. Developments in the payment block must benefit all sales channels. It must be able to be decommissioned / replaced easily if we change partners.” | Complicated Subsystem team “Service Paiement” | X-as-a-service with “Products” |
| Sharing best practices: “In addition, we noticed that certain best practices in the implementation of the payment service allowed us to earn 34 conversion points.” | Complicated Subsystem team “Service Paiement” | Collaboration with Products “Front Web” and “Front Mobile” |
The model is not set in stone; it will be initialized and then adjusted according to many evolving parameters:
