Transforming ivory tower architecture to enabling teams

Many large organizations are still working with centralized architecture related teams. Their role is often to provide architectural specifications to other teams and to ensure that these specifications are adhered to during implementation. These teams are often referred to as „ivory tower architecture“ teams, which aim at bundling high skilled architects. This role is certainly not available in abundance on the market.

However, they don’t scale in an agile environment, in which we want to empower teams to make their own decisions. Certain guardrails are nevertheless necessary to ensure that the overall construct is functional. Furthermore, well-chosen guard rails can also drastically reduce the need for coordination between the teams.

We need to enable those teams to do most of the architectural work on their own, while still making sure that the bits and pieces fit together. This is where Team Topologies, a methodology introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, come into play. There is one team type called „Enabling Team“.

This talk gives you a hands-on guidance on how to transform a centralized architecture team towards an enabling team whose job it is to improve architectural work in other teams. You will learn:

• Which stakeholders to include in this journey
• Why the soon-to-be enabling team needs to be enabled as well and how to do that
• Where common pitfalls on this journey are
• Why this journey must be done in an agile manner with continuous learning and retrospectives

This talk will also include many examples from practical experience guiding such a transformation.

Date

2023-10-05

Time

10:15 - 11:15

Conference / Event

Agile meets Architecture 2023

Venue

Berlin, Berlin