Table Of Contents
Combining three clever ideas
I recently watched a fantastic talk by Susanne Kaiser about how to structure you IT department for flow.
She combines three tools in a very clever way:
- Wardley Maps
- Domain Driven Design
- Team Topologies
Let’s check out how she uses these tools!
The tools
Wardley Maps
Wardley Maps are a great tool to create a business strategy.
It’s a tool to brainstorm where the value of your business comes from. It then helps to determine which parts of the value chain you want to build on your own - and which ones are a commodity which an be bought more easily.
Susanne uses that tool for two things:
- Brainstorm the usergroups - and what the usergroups want to achieve (aka value flow)
- Depict the status quo and develop the target architecture - jointly with DDD and Team topologies.
Domain Driven Design (DDD)
Domain driven design is a way to separate computer systems into their basic parts. In general one domain should not share anything with the other domain. This makes sure that teams can work independently.
Lot’s of books have been written about Domain Driven Design - Eric Evan’s book is for sure the classic to read.
Team Topologies
[Team topologies](https://teamtopologies.com/ by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is another thinking tool to structure your IT department.
Teams come in four shapes:
- Stream-aligned team
- Platform Team
- Enabling Team
- Complicated subsystem team
Team topologies also help to reduce the mental load and increase the autonomy of teams. A stream-aligned team has one thing to do and does it well. Other things are done by the other teams. Interactions between the teams should be minimized.
Conclusion
- wrote a book
