Socio-Technical Evolution: Growing an Architecture and Its Organization for Fast Flow

Achieving fast flow—the rapid and reliable delivery of change—requires picking the right socio-technical architecture: a combination of software architecture and organizational structure suited to your context. To paraphrase Einstein, it should be as simple as possible but no simpler. Unfortunately, many enterprises fall into the trap of over-engineering their architecture while simultaneously misaligning their teams, resulting in unnecessary complexity and friction that slows delivery.

In this presentation, I describe a strategy for starting with the simplest possible socio-technical architecture for your context and then incrementally evolving it to support fast flow. You will learn about the building blocks of socio-technical architecture. I explain how organizational structures, like architectural elements, exist to solve specific problems and must evolve as those problems change. You will learn to recognize the signals that indicate when your socio-technical architecture needs to change—and how to transform it accordingly.