CROZ is a mid-sized professional services company with around 300 tech-oriented people. We use our technical, domain, and organizational expertise to help our clients build better products and achieve their business goals.

The problem we encountered:

With the speed of innovation higher than ever and the technology more complex than ever, we realized that our existing teams couldn't keep tabs on every moving part in the new technology stack that was emerging in the cloud.

Apart from working with our clients on designing and implementing new features, our teams became overwhelmed with the nuances of the underlying technology platform. Additionally, with each team using the platform as they saw fit, we experienced a proliferation of delivery process variations and various practices to use the platform. It wasn’t even clear what a platform is.

The net effect we have observed was people spending time designing their variation of the delivery process and reinventing existing practices. We have also observed a cumbersome team onboarding process due to the lack of standardization, and technical debt skyrocketing just before the major technology platform migration was to take place.

All of the above reflected in a significant decrease in the flow of value to the clients.

What did we do to overcome the problem?

Looking for a different way to structure our teams and coordinate work, we have found our inspiration in four fundamental team topologies and their interaction modes from the book Team Topologies.

A year after introducing the platform team and establishing interactions with the rest of the organization, we found that the new team structure better promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing, relieves cognitive load from existing teams enabling them to focus on delivering value to our clients, and serves as additional leverage for further organizational improvement initiatives.

Thinking in terms of four fundamental team topologies and three core interaction modes cleared up some ambiguities around roles and responsibilities in the delivery process. This enabled teams to focus on what they love and do best, motivating them to further build their skills. It also made the role of every team member in the delivery process transparent. No other past initiative produced such engagement among people.

In every sociotechnical organization, technology aspects and organization aspects are tightly intertwined. Looking back, we have changed the former without considering the latter and the system pushed back with a tangible manifestation through friction and bottlenecks occurring in the delivery process.

In this talk, we will share the experience of our on-going sociotechnical transformation, and changes that worked for us, but also some that didn't.