The TOP Structure - how it all started

As you may already be aware, my latest project is the "TOP Structure." Let me give you some insights into how it all started. Back then, it wasn't very refined, just some thoughts in my head.

The world of traditional IT

Traditional IT organizations typically separate themselves into a development and an operational area. To execute, they again separate into line and project - commonly resulting in matrix organizations. Requests for delivery of new stuff are typically thrown over the fence by "business," or - in more advanced companies - negotiated by Business Analysts. In any case, once a project was scoped, we task a Project Manager with ensuring delivery in TQB. That leaves Project Managers with a wide range of work: setting up a capable team, prioritizing and distributing work, coordinating schedules and tracking progress. Unfortunately, as the proverb goes, "if everything is important, nothing is." Many project managers drown in schedules and tracking, leaving them little time for taking care of the people doing the work.

Scrum changed the game

The move to "stable teams" and continuous "product development" led to the need for a different way to structure teams, and Scrum provided it. In a Scrum context, the line no longer "provides resources" to "projects." And there's no more a final delivery thrown over the fence at the deadline - software in an agile setting is never "finished." Features become available in a continuous flow of value.

Still, line managers have a role - and oftentimes, business initiatives are still funded as pre-packaged projects scoped for "Agile Delivery."

Why is all of that relevant? Because of the resulting interactions.

Scrum teams learn to self-organize themselves, and how to manage their interactions with their surrounding organization. The person accountable for this is the Scrum Master. Often being neither technical nor understanding the product in depth, Scrum Masters focus on Organization. Their value proposal isn't in any code they write or anything sold to customers - it's enabling their team, focusing on "Who" and "How." (i.e. people and process)

The second key of a successful Scrum team is the Product Owner, focused on the Product. Both organization and implementation aren't their concern, only ensuring that the "What" and "Why" are clear and prioritized, so that stakeholders are happy and the team does the most valuable thing at the most suitable moment.

And finally, what would be a good Scrum team without competent developers? They take care both of development and outcomes, that is: they do everything technical. Developers own their Technology.

SAFe repeats the same

Let's do a simple relabeling exercise to demonstrate how SAFe copy+pasted Scrum in this regard, at a level of abstraction.

Competency	Scrum Role	SAFe Role
Scope	Scrum Team	Agile Release Train
Technology	Developer	Agile Team
Organization	Scrum Master	Release Train Engineer
Product	Product Owner	Product Manager

(Now - we could formidably debate whether SAFe's copy+paste approach at scale is appropriate and smart, but that's not my point.) I'd like to highlight that if we gloss over implementation details, then Scrum succeeds most likely when there's sufficient attention being paid to all of Technology, Organization and Product (TOP) - and SAFe must repeat the same thing at a higher level of abstraction.

From this, the idea was born of the TOP Structure as a universal pattern: To succeed with a sustainable software organization, you must ensure that all three domains receive sufficient attention.

Thus, the idea behind TOP is first and foremost that we have to build a structure that pays appropriate attention to all three domains, staffs them with sufficient competency, and doesn't force us into making either-or choices between them. Which is what often got traditional Projects into trouble - a PM rarely has time to fix organizational issues, as deadlines are constantly pressing.

TOP Dysfunctions

Let's turn this around, and take a quick peek at what happens when we pay too little - or no - attention to one of the core TOP competencies:

Illustration	Dysfunction	Consequence
	Exclusive Tech Focus	Technical excellence disconnected from people and their needs - technological wonders that nobody needs.
	Exclusive Product Focus	Ephemeral, great ideas that eventually get killed by the inability to execute.
	Over-focus on Organization	Having the right people working effectively means little when it's not the right thing.
	Lack of Product Focus	An over-focus on methods and implementations could lead to missing the needs of the customer entirely.
	Lack of Organizational Focus	A "bias for action" mindset that bulldozes over people and their needs in order to "move fast and break things." Gets things done in early phases, leads to unproductive (and potentially extremely costly) chaos in the long term.
	Lack of Technical Focus	Emphasizing value generation and order, at the expense of technical sustainability. Most such products incur fatal technical debt at some point in the future.
	(none)	Technology, Organization and Product all get sufficient attention, nothing gets shoved under the rug and energy is distributed wisely in each domain.

The TOP Question

And thus, the idea of the TOP Structure was born as a simple, yet effective mechanism of asking the question: "We have 100% of our energy. We can distribute it in any way that we want. Where should we put how much?" There's no fixed or perfect ratio such as, "60% T, 10% O, 30% P" that would serve as a recipe for success. Instead, the first answer is often, "We currently spend too much energy on (X) and too little energy on (Y).

TOP thus started as a simple tool for teams, teams-of-teams and entire organizations to determine whether sufficient energy was invested into the different areas in the past - and whether we should redistribute that energy in the future. For example: "We'd need a bit more time for process improvement, and a bit more for Refinement. That's only possible if we invest a bit less of our time for development - can we do that? How? Is there something in any of the competencies we're currently doing that we could discontinue?"

How it evolved

As you can already see from the three circles - they overlap. Initially, I put "management" into the center, with the intent of stating that management has the responsibility that all three competencies get adequate staffing, funding and attention. Then I decided that this isn't what we'd like in self-managing teams. So I decided to put "Teams" into the center, indicating that a self-managing teams should do all of that. It didn't feel right, either. And thus, the current version of the TOP Competency Spectrum was born:

The TOP Competencies

The model of the TOP Competencies Spectrum is mostly a reshape of the circles into one segmented circle, giving names to the different intersects of the circle:

As you move further away from pure technology towards organization, you enter the domain of Architecture, concerned with the question of "Do we have the right means of doing what we do, and is how we do it the best way of doing it?" - Architecture, in the TOP Competencies model, isn't a separate thing from either Technology or Organization: it's the discipline that brings both together!

Likewise, Design fuses the question, "Why do people need it?" with "How do people need it?" - crossing the chasm between user perspective and technical implementation. Thus, the TOP competency of Design requires connecting technical and product competency for best outcomes. Which is needed to which extent at which time - may vary, and as the color indicates: it's a blended mix.

The other TOP Competencies are similar: At the outer part of the circle, activities are more "domain specific," and the closer we get to the center of the circle, the TOP Competencies blend and become indistinguishable. 

Quality, at the core of the TOP Competencies, is much more than "product quality" - it's quality of everything: how we communicate, how we work, what we produce, and any other outcomes we get (including, of course, satisfaction with our jobs.) As quality is everything in a TOP Structure, it's also everyone's responsibility, and everyone constantly contributes towards it, be it consciously or unconsciously, positively or negatively. The TOP Structure should remind us of this, and inspire us to replace unconscious poor quality choices with conscious good quality choices.

This extended model of the TOP Structure focuses less on the question of "Where do we assign our energy?" - somehow, the entire circle makes up for 100% of our energy, with fluctuating investments across the week - it focuses more on People and Interactions: In our current organization, how do we interact with ... Architecture? Is it smooth, do we have boundaries? Where is it: is it part of the team, or outside? Does information flow freely from and towards that domain, or is it thrown over the fence? 

Is there a continuous exchange between developers and product people, or is it a stage-gated Waterfall? What does our relationship between design and quality look like: Do we design for quality, or do testers consume the result of a design process for test case creation?

The TOP Structure, in this regard, makes no imposition of what you must do - much rather, it guides us in the questions we can ask to identify where we've got improvement potential and where we're potentially missing something important.

What's next

And that's how I formed the basis for the entire model of the TOP Structure you can now find on my official company page. I invite you to sign up to my newsletter and follow me, because I have big plans for the TOP Structure: I believe it should be a staple tool for any Coach and Consultant supporting organizations on their journey of Continuous Improvement - regardless of which framework, or no framework, or the approach they choose.

My own journey with TOP has just really begun to get exciting - you're still in time to be an early adopter!

There's always a bigger context!

Have you wondered why so many people, organizations - and even humanity as a whole, constantly find themselves in a mess that's hard to scramble out of?

The reason is quite simple: because we are quite short-term oriented, and we either don't see - or discount - the bigger context we're acting in!

Virtuous Cycles

When we want something that we don't have (or: not enough from), we change something in a way that we predict that we'll get what we're looking for. We then see if that did work, and we'll continue doing more of that until we have enough. And we do the opposite when we don't want something that we do have. 

Feedback loops help us to pause, stop or course correct while we're at it.

A trivial example of a virtuous cycle might be lunch: When we're hungry, we want food. We get our portion, like it, and eat some more. (If we don't like the food, we might get something else instead.) We continue eating until either our portion is gone, or our stomach signals "Full."

Vicious Cycles

A vicious cycle isn't the direct opposite of a virtuous cycle - it's when we do something, and get something we don't want. For example, if we'd really like that wild honey, and put our hand into the beehive: the longer we leave our hand in there, the more we'll get stung.

Short term and long term

In the short term, we complete one action and observe the immediate results. For example, we grab a candy bar, and it satisfies our craving. We can repeat this cycle again and again, and we get predictable and repeatable results (well, until our stomach tells us we had too much candy.)

In the long term, however, we get other results than in the short term: while one candy satisfies our craving, one hundred days of repeated snacking will lead to some weight gain, and two years' worth of snacking will result in a wobbly tummy.

Thus, the virtuous cylce of "craving satisfied" is embedded in a vicious cycle of "gain weight."

Inseparability of cycles

In our simple example, it's impossible to separate the short-term virtuous cycle from the long-term vicious cycle: as the proverb goes, "you can't have your cake and eat it, too." The action that starts the virtuous cycle will also set the vicious cycle in motion. 

The desirable short-term outcomes of the virtuous cycle are immediately visible, so we're tempted to set it in motion. On the flip side, the long-term outcomes of the vicious cycle are invisible at the moment, so we're tempted to discount them in favor of the proven and tangible short-term benefits.

Shocking consequences

We find ourselves continuously repeating the virtuous cycle, with the firm belief that what we're doing is beneficial, until - one day, in our example, we get a Diabetes diagnosis: It's impossible to attribute the diabetes to any single piece of candy we consumed. Even worse: simply stopping the virtuous cycle of meeting our craving isn't going to change the situation we're in, and the process of reverting the vicious cycle will be difficult to impossible. There's no easy "undo" action related to anything we did in the past.

We were caught by the embedded larger context of our visible virtuous cycle: the invisible vicious cycle.

What does our little example imply for a software organization, then?

What you see isn't what you get!

Take a look at this diagram which illustrates the larger systemic context we may find ourselves in:

We always get positive feedback from our immediate action, so we learn that our action is good.

For example, let's say the developer who's always fastest (by skipping tests) learns that they get praise by customers and management, whereas the developers who are always slowest (by building quality in) learn that they'd get more appreciation by cutting short on quality.

The short-term virtuous cycle is that developers learn how to deliver faster and meet tight deadlines.

Unfortunately, by the time we realize the effects of the vicious cycle, our product is probably almost dead: it might take months, possibly years, to trace out and fix all the bugs in the code, and that's not even calculating the effort (and frustration) of adding tests to an unmaintainable codebase.

And worse than that, we only have developers left who have - over the years - learned that building quality in is bad for their careers.

By the time we've come to realize that the vicious circle has taken over, there's no quick fix any more, and the cost of change, at this point in time, is overwhelming.

Scrambling out of the mess

When we realize that we got something that we don't want, we have a myriad of problems to address:

1. We must discover a way to re-wire the outer vicious cycle by disrupting it, and replacing it with a vicious cycle.
   
   
2. We must become conscious that the presumed virtuous cycle did spin off a vicious cycle, and must stop triggering more of the vicious cycle.
   
   
3. We must un-learn and stop the old virtuous cycle, despite the visible short-term benefits.
   This step is very hard, because we must actively reject the benefits we attributed to it.
   
   
4. We must actively pursue the new virtuous cycle, despite it being slow, and the benefits being less visible than the benefits of the old virtuous cycle. This requires strong discipline, because it's easy to lapse into old habits, potentially eliminating months of progress with a single act of carelessness.
   
   

Unfortuntately, since we saw short-term benefits in the past, we tend to look for a new way that undoes all of the damage caused by the vicious cycle in the blink of an eye: instead of actively doing the hard work of behavioural and belief change, we often hunt for a miracle pill. And thus start another vicious cycle.

Let me put it like it is:

If a physical building has collapsed because it was built using poor materials, you can't just swallow a pill to rebuild the entire thing. The only way forward is to clean up the rubble, get better materials, and construct a more stable building.

And that's how you get sustainable change:

1. Become clear what got you into the bigger mess.
2. Stop doing that, even if it gave you results you were looking for.
3. Clean up the shambles.
4. Create something new that avoids the vicious cycle.