Efficiency · 06 / 07
Conway’s law
Organizations design systems that copy their communication structures. How teams are split ends up deciding the dependencies between them, and with them the lead time.
Try it
The same modules and the same people, split in two ways. Choose how the teams are organized and pick a request, then see how many teams it passes through and how long it waits in their queues.
- Teams it passes through
- –
- Handoffs
- –
- Lead time of this request
- –
- Average lead time of the four
- –
Simplified model: one day of work per module and three days of waiting in the queue of each new team, with no congestion.
Where it applies
- Separate frontend, backend and data teams mean three queues to coordinate for every feature.
- A bank with one department per channel ends up with an app, a website and branches that do not share customer data.
- Before redesigning an architecture, teams are reorganized around value streams: the inverse Conway maneuver.
Where it comes from
Melvin E. Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?” (Datamation, April 1968). Fred Brooks named it Conway’s law in “The Mythical Man-Month” (1975), and MacCormack, Rusnak and Baldwin found empirical evidence for it in Research Policy (2012).
Bring it to your organization
In my workshops and diagnoses we work on this and other principles over your team’s real flow of work, with your data rather than the simulation’s. See services or write to me.