Fast flow embraces decoupling, autonomy, asynchrony, and eventual consistency for both technology and for organisation design, together with a humanistic, team-first approach.
These insights explain and explore how organizations can encourage an ecosystem suitable for fast flow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
… 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.”
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 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.
