Modern Architectural Work: From Defining to Enabling

Many large organizations still work with centralized architecture-related teams. Their role is often to provide architectural specifications to other teams and ensure that these specifications are adhered to during implementation. These teams are often referred to as “ivory tower architecture” teams that aim to bundle highly skilled architects. This role is certainly not available in abundance on the market.

However, they do not fit into an agile environment where we want to give teams the opportunity to make their own decisions. Certain guard rails are nevertheless necessary to ensure that the overall construct works. In addition, well-chosen guard rails can also drastically reduce the need for coordination between teams.

We need to enable these teams to do most of the architectural work themselves, while ensuring that the individual parts fit together. This is where Team Topologies, a concept introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, comes into play. There is a team type called the ” Enabling Team” which, in a nutshell, supports other teams with knowledge and methodology.

This presentation will give you an overview of this change as well as practical guidance on how to transform a centralized architecture team into an enabling team whose task is to improve the architecture work in other teams. You will learn:
– Which stakeholders you should involve in this process
– Why the future enabling team also needs to be empowered and how to do this
– Where common pitfalls lie on this journey
– Why this journey needs to be done in an agile way with continuous learning and retrospectives

This talk will also include many real-life examples that accompany such a transformation.