The Study of Enterprise Agility Community: Global Enterprise Agility Month — Teams Week

In 2019, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais published their book Team Topologies which has since gone to to receive much critical acclaim. The book covers practises, patterns and anti-patterns which help enterprises organise business and technology teams for fast flow.

In this session, Matthew discusses the principles behind Team Topologies before Paul Ingles (CTO, uSwitch.com), John Kilmister (Software Architect, PureGym), Richard Allen (Team Topologies Advocate) and Ivan Krnic (Directior of Engineering, CROZ) describe how they applied insights from the book to help them achieve their goals.

If unchecked, agile working and multidisciplinary teams can silo organisations by teams, programmes and functions. These silos lead to duplication of work, pockets of knowledge, unrealised capability potential; even worse, it cuts people off from their support network. Our organisations are scaling, structures are flattening, workforces are increasingly fluid, and the future or where we work isn’t set. Connecting people and breaking down silos is more critical now than ever - this is where communities of practice come in.

Communities of practice bring people together who share common challenges and interests, connecting them to create something more significant than the people within it.

In this session, Emily Webber will draw from her experiences and research to share the benefits of communities of practice, the pitfalls and advice.


In part two of this session (43:20), Emily is joined by Amanda Light for a conversation about an organisation they both worked with, where communities of practice were employed.


Finally, in part three (1:10:10) Emily is joined by SEACOM's Barry Chandler for a Q&A.

In this session,we will be joined by author of Dynamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand, to discuss the varies ways reteaming happens and if managed correctly, how it can improve an enterprises ability to adapt and help people enjoy what they do.

After that we will hear from Chris Smith, Head of Product Delivery at Redgate Software.

For the past three years, Redgate has run a self-selection reteaming process to reconfigure how their teams are assigned to reflect the company’s strategy and plans for the year ahead. The approach has been to allow people to strongly influence where in the new team structure they will work, encouraging them to move towards the work they find most engaging. They’ve come to re-evaluate the traditional wisdom of aiming for very stable teams and recognise the virtues of deliberately and thoughtfully changing-up teams. This approach has helped us create a development culture of engagement, resilience and opportunity. And our team-game is still as strong as ever.

Chris will share how Redgate came to try it’s own style of self-selection team reorganisation. He’ll talk about how this has become an established annual event, the challenges and benefits of the approach and now we adapted the process to reteam a fully-remote workforce in January 2021.