Are Your Teams Architected for Agility?
Agility has been a hot topic in the software industry for a while now, but what does it take for an engineering team to become effectively agile?
In my years as VP of Engineering at Simform, I've seen my fair share of agile teams.
Some struggle to find their rhythm, while others operate on a different level entirely, delivering exceptional results with effortless coordination. It's a bit like magic, but as any good engineering leader knows, there's always a method behind the magic.
You need a deep understanding of the complex interplay between team structures, communication patterns, and collaborative workflows to unlock this 'magic.’
It's a multifaceted puzzle that demands a holistic approach – one that integrates modern-day frameworks like team topologies with battle-tested insights from real-world transformations. And that's precisely what we'll be diving into in this edition.
But first, I'm thrilled to share some exciting news: Simform has acquired Armakuni, a leader in modernizing software development practices and enhancing engineering capabilities for organizations.
With Simform's expertise in building cutting-edge AI/ML solutions with Armakuni's capabilities in optimizing team structures and processes, this acquisition marks an exciting new chapter in our journey of helping organizations achieve generative AI-powered growth.
In this edition, we’ll talk more about:
Simform’s acquisition of Armakuni
Team Topologies: The secret to building truly agile teams
ING Bank's journey to agile success
Let’s get started!
Armakuni acquired by Simform to transform organisations for gen AI-readiness
Simform has acquired Armakuni, a UK-based AWS Partner and specialists in driving the change needed to create high-performing software engineering teams.
Armakuni, the world’s first Team Topologies partner, helps organizations accelerate customer value delivery by facilitating agile engineering capabilities.
Their approach perfectly complements Simform’s expertise and vision. Together, we will build a unified organization that will help enterprises improve how they build software and adopt newer technologies like gen AI, ML, Cloud, and Data Engineering.
Let’s see how!
How Simform and Armakuni will benefit gen AI-ready enterprises
The combined expertise of Simform and Armakuni makes the venture a perfect partner for any enterprise seeking growth in the age of AI.
Top-notch Gen AI solutions, at scale: Simform’s advanced Gen AI competency and body of work, along with Armakuni’s extensive experience in helping enterprises drive change, is the perfect combination for any organization looking to launch AI/ML-enabled features and products.
Faster and consistent builds on the cloud: Armakuni helps enterprises at various stages of their cloud adoption journey with engineering agility. Simform, an AWS Premier Tier Services partner and a global leader in building on cloud technologies, easily tackles any complex cloud challenge whilst staying cost-efficient.
Live in weeks, not months: From enterprise-wide planning to overseeing efficient agile teams, Simform and Armakuni's combined expertise ensures your ideas move to production in weeks rather than months.
As we begin this exciting new chapter, I want to take a moment to thank our fantastic team at Simform for their unwavering dedication and hard work.
And to our valued clients, thank you for your trust and support. As we integrate Armakuni's expertise into our offerings, we hope to continue to deliver solutions that drive your business forward.
Team Topologies: The secret to building truly agile teams
Until now, organizing engineering teams around business capabilities was a good means to meet customer needs, but such teams often find themselves overwhelmed by the breadth of skills and knowledge required to deliver end-to-end value.
Enter Team Topologies, a revolutionary framework that's taking the software world by storm.
Developed by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, this approach recognizes that the key to high-performance lies not just in how you structure your teams, but in how those teams interact.
At its core, Team Topologies identifies four key team types:
Stream-Aligned Teams: Cross-functional teams aligned with specific business capabilities. Think of a team dedicated to your company's mobile app experience or one focused on the online checkout process.
Platform Teams: These teams enable stream-aligned teams by providing internal services and tools. For example, a team responsible for developing and maintaining a company-wide design system or a team offering a self-service testing infrastructure.
Enabling Teams: These teams work alongside stream-aligned teams, coaching them in specialized areas like security or performance optimization. Picture a team of UX experts helping product teams conduct usability testing and implement best practices.
Complicated Subsystem Teams: These teams own particularly complex or domain-heavy components, exposing them as services to other teams. Consider a team dedicated to a machine learning model for fraud detection that other teams can leverage through a clean API.
But the real magic of Team Topologies lies in how these teams interact:
Collaboration: In this mode, teams work closely together, often seen when a platform or complicated subsystem team is first establishing their service. Imagine the fraud detection team sitting down with the payment processing team to understand their needs and constraints.
X-as-a-Service: Once a platform or subsystem is stable, teams consume it as a service, with minimal direct collaboration. The payment processing team might simply call the fraud detection API, trusting the other team to keep it running smoothly.
Facilitating: This is how enabling teams interact, acting as coaches and partners rather than enforcers. The UX enabling team would work alongside product teams, upskilling them and helping them incorporate user-centric practices into their day-to-day work.
By being deliberate about team boundaries and interactions, Team Topologies aims to reduce the cognitive load on individual teams.
Stream-aligned teams can focus on understanding user needs and rapidly delivering value, while platform and enabling teams make their work easier and more effective. The end result? An organization that's optimized for fast flow, learning, and adaptability - crucial capabilities in today's fast-moving software landscape.
Check out these case studies to understand how organizations have practically leveraged Team Topologies for successful agile transformation.
ING bank's journey to agile success
In 2014, ING, a global banking group, recognized the need to adapt to the changing landscape of consumer banking.
To meet evolving customer expectations and remain competitive, ING CEO Ralph Hamers and Nick Jue, then CEO of ING's Netherlands group, started a transformative journey to revamp their retail operations using agile methodologies.
Tribes, Squads, and Chapters
By the spring of 2015, ING Netherlands headquarters, home to approximately 3,500 employees, had replaced most of its traditional structure with an agile organization composed of tribes, squads, and chapters.
The new structure consisted of 13 tribes, each addressing specific domains such as mortgage services, securities, and private banking.
Within these tribes, self-steering squads of nine or fewer people were created to address specific customer needs by delivering and maintaining new products and services.
These cross-disciplinary squads, typically comprising marketing specialists, data analysts, user-experience designers, IT engineers, and product specialists, stayed together until the customer need was met (for example, improving user experience on the mobile app or building a particular feature).
By working in small, diverse teams, squad members could quickly resolve issues that might have previously bounced between departments.
Then there are chapters, which bring together members of the same discipline—like data analytics or systems processes—who are spread across different squads. Chapter leads oversee best practices, professional development, and performance reviews for their respective disciplines.
Assessment and results
Regular assessments, including biweekly reviews, post-engagement self-assessments, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs), were built into the system to maintain alignment with company strategy and encourage continuous improvement.
Two years into the transformation, ING witnessed significant improvements in customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and time-to-market for new products. Encouraged by these results, the bank began rolling out the new way of working for its 40,000 employees outside the Netherlands. Read more about it in ING employees’ own words.