Assess Business Agility with
Org Topologies™ Mapping
Erik, Director of Engineering
"Are fast-flow teams enough for an efficient organization?"
Erik, the Director of Engineering, is interested in creating fast, modern R&D.
And now, as the majority of Erik's teams are mastering fast flow, he has started to wonder what the true north for his R&D is. Erik has observed that even though all the teams are working at full speed and doing their best, it is still challenging to deliver what truly matters from the business and customer viewpoint.
His recent insight: there is more to creating an efficient organization than creating autonomous fast-flow teams.
But how to capture today's successes and move on without losing the flow and hitting the limits of people's cognitive load?
Sixteen Archetypes
Download the Org Topologies™ Primer
The Primer is a free, comprehensive summary of the Org Topologies™ visual thinking tool to help you assess and design your agile ecosystem and its change over time.
Two Axes of the Map
The Org Topologies™ Map is an overview of recognizable organizational archetypes we have observed in Agile product development organizations. The map gives an overview of sixteen archetypes that serve as organizational building blocks for creating product development ecosystems.
The archetypes (boxes) are ordered according to their fluency along two axes:
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Completeness of Capabilities is the level of cross-functionality for the flow in delivering value
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Scope of Work refers to the breadth of the domain a given organizational unit is working on and learning about.
Power of the Language
The Org Topologies™ Mapping provides a radically transparent language for organizational development. Using this powerful visual language, we can now communicate the org design of a value-creating parts of the organization using a very specific vocabulary.
For instance, instead of vague:
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"We have agile teams"
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"We are organized with SAFe ARTs"
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or "We have some stream-aligned, platform and complex-subsystem teams from team topologies"
now with the help of Org Topologies we can be much more specific, saying:
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"We are a department where most of the teams are A2 and some are grown to become A3. There is also a Y2 functional group that supports the A-level teams. Our vision is to elevate the teams to form a B2-B3 level ecosystem with teams working on shared business objectives".
Notices how the Org Topologies™ language helps to communicate both, the current and the target org designs. We have noticed that such a more elaborate explanation of the org design invites a deeper conversation on the current challenges and systemic improvements.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
And you can also map your ecosystem, creating a visual representation of all the work units. Such illustration can serve as a powerful alignment tool and assessment tool.
Before designing org change, it is critical to develop an in-depth understanding of the system at hand. Org Topologies™ provides a shared visual language. By using it, you can accurately describe the value-creating ecosystem, assess its key qualities and only then move towards designing and adopting the desired future state.
Deep Dive into Org Topologies™ Mapping
Org Topologies™ Maps can be used for many purposes.
Some examples include:
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Mapping the product development ecosystem to understand how to improve time to market.
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Map teams in Sprint Retrospectives to find possible areas of growth.
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Map to remove noise from stakeholders' perceptions of the abilities of teams.
Mapping Frameworks
The phrase "we are doing SAFe" (or any other framework) doesn't say much about your current organizational design and its target future state.
Speaking of SAFe, from the Org Topologies™ perspective it is mostly implemented with interdependent component teams and incomplete multidisciplinary teams (Y2 & A2 archetypes). They plan and do their work sequentially within Agile Release Trains (ART).
Org Topologies™ provides a powerful language to map all the teams in a given ART to study their dependencies and see the opportunities for improvement, inside and outside the ART.
Mapping SAFe
Stories from the Trenches
Expert Product and Agile Coach
"It was so much easier to describe the FlixBus agile journey using Org Topologies™, which otherwise would need much more explanation and reasoning. Mapping product depth and team skills dimensions bridges the gap between applying frameworks and discovering ways to organize teams. Thank you for the elegant system to visualize organizational growth."
Org. development I Executive coaching
"Last fall I was introduced to the very interesting work by Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm. They have aggregated their enormous base of experiences into a reality-oriented thinking tool. It can help us all create a common language and share a mental map... I tested their very early version on the management in a mid-sized fintech in Europe last fall (approx 15 teams). It was so inspiring to see how it immediately increased the quality of the conversations and their own reasoning on what they were optimizing for."
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