As an architect, you make choices everyday about whether to speak up or stay silent. You choose who to listen to and whose voice to discount. Your teams and your organisations develop ‘conversational habits’ internally and externally, with stakeholders, around what gets said and who gets heard.

These habits have enormous consequences on your capacity to challenge and be challenged and offer and hear different perspectives. Ultimately, what you say and who you hear defines your reputation, your career, your ability to pivot in crisis and is a critical factor in shaping your lasting influence on the physical environment.

Professor Megan Reitz’s research suggests that counter to common perceptions, speaking up is more than a simple question of individual courage; speaking truth to power should be understood as relational and systemic.  Listening up is as important, if not more important, than speaking up. Findings illustrate how those perceived to be powerful are often deaf to the consequences of their power and how it silences others. Inviting others to speak and listening skilfully, proactively encouraging truth speaking and creating a culture of psychological safety is a fundamental leadership task.

In this talk Professor Reitz will explain how to say what needs to be said, and hear what needs to be heard.

The argument about what an architect is or isn’t is endless. This talk takes a step back from the old cliches about alignment and whether or not we should code and instead looks at the historical perspective through the wider lens of the philosophy of science. Who are we? Why do we think the way we do? Is it really working out for us?

During the early days of computer science, there was very close collaboration between research, both academic and industrial, and industry practitioners. During the recent decades, however, the two worlds have moved apart and academic research has little impact on industrial practice and visa versa. One example of this is that during the last 30 years or so, not a single major computer science innovation in industry has originated in academia.

The Software Center is a collaboration between 16 companies and five universities with the mission of accelerating the digital transformation of the European software intensive industry and aims to regain close collaboration between industry and academia. During the talk, I will present the collaboration and highlight five elements that are of strategic importance for successful industry/academia collaboration.

EventStorming was born for a physical world.

How did the pandemic change it, how can we leverage collaborative modelling to design and redesign organisations, business processes and software in a remote-first world?

Being wrong is often seen as the worst thing that can happen™, especially when you architect, build, and run business-critical applications and services. But the increased velocity of modern software development, plus the increased need for systems to be resilient, reliable, and right has increased the pressure on teams, and in particular architects, exponentially. Never before have software owners had such an opportunity, or the power, to be wrong. We need to get better at being wrong.

Russ Miles, CEO of Reliably, discusses the tools and techniques he uses to turn inevitably being wrong into being successful at being wrong. Being wrong can be turned to your advantage, and Russ shares stories of how this has happened and also the challenges to look out for.

The myth of always being right when you architect, build, and operate software is over. You’re going to be wrong most of the time. Time to get better at being wrong and learn how to turn accidents such as outages into opportunities.

In this talk we explore how several different organizations from around the world have begun to adopt the principles and patterns from Team Topologies and how these changes have helped to improve software delivery. We will look at examples from these organizations:

→ Footasylum gives fashion-focused youth a multi-branded retail experience mixing global sportswear household names with emerging brands and its own stable of in-house labels. Founded in 2005, Footasylum now has 70 stores across the UK and a thriving ecommerce platform, with revenue of £260m per annum and over 2500 employees. Footasylum used Team Topologies patterns to revolutionize their ecommerce platform.

→ PureGym is Britain’s largest gym chain – the first to gain over 1 million members. As PureGym expanded, so did the need for software to enable their members to book and manage gym sessions. Since 2019, PureGym has re-aligned its teams and team interactions based on Team Topologies patterns, helping to scale the engineering teams and improve flow.

→ uSwitch / RVU, one of the UK’s leading consumer price comparison websites, has grown a modern platform from scratch, allowing stream-aligned teams to focus on consumers needs, offloading infrastructure provisioning concerns to the platform which also provides cross-cutting services around scalability, security and data management

→ Wealth Wizards is a UK company making financial advice affordable and accessible to everyone through online tools and apps. The engineering division at Wealth Wizards has used the Team Topologies ideas around team cognitive load to help right-size their teams and align teams to the most important flows of business change.