Team Topologies : Cognitive Load

What is Cognitive Load?

In articles about team topologies, you will hear much talk about Cognitive Load. In this article, I am trying to explain what it is and a few small tips to see how you can lower the Cognitive Load on your teams.

Cognitive Load is yet another vital aspect of strategizing and designing team topologies. In the previous article, we saw the significance of growing feedback, and now we'll be looking at something much more fundamental - Cognitive Load. What exactly is it?

Matthew Skelton's book on team topologies expertly describes this. Think of any individual working in a team. They might have a certain limit or capacity regarding how much knowledge they possess, their skills, and the value they can add to any development process. 

In any organization, the team is the smallest unit in a software development process, not an individual. The Cognitive Load is the maximum knowledge and skills it possesses and the value it can add. The Cognitive Load is essentially the sum of each individual's capacity as part of the team. 

Cognitive Load is one of the most neglected factors when dividing teams and assigning responsibilities. However, not considering this can lead to any team exhausting its bandwidth extremely fast, which is something any organization doesn't want. 

A simple example can be if a team is assigned a project for which they might not have the necessary skillsets, or if they have the skillsets, the workload would be enormous for the team. A definite result would be that the product development won't be up to the mark or they wouldn't be able to meet the deadline. 

All of this can be termed a delivery bottleneck. In addition, there will be numerous other issues such as too many bugs, the team morale going down, and the client being unhappy. To ensure all of this doesn't happen, have a team-first approach. 

While looking at a project, assess its different aspects, such as the workload and required skillsets, and then form a team or multiple teams accordingly. This way, every team will work in the most optimized fashion. 

In the previous articles, we saw how setting team dependencies, boundaries, and optimal communications could further help reduce the bottlenecks. However, there are a few other practices an organization can adopt. These include the following:

• Match the responsibilities assigned to the team to their Cognitive Load.
• Set boundaries between teams regarding responsibilities and tasks, so there's less overhead time. It would also help save the workforce's energy and resources on unnecessary tasks. 
• Measurement of Cognitive Load is yet another important way of determining the value and understanding what the team can be assigned. Again, this needn't be an exact value but a relative number to gauge the burden on the team.
• Have a cap for the number of domains you assign to a team. This way, a team won't need expertise in too many environments while giving them room to learn more about newer domains.

These are a few main ways in which the bottlenecks can be reduced. The entire point of determining and being aware of the cognitive Load is to ensure that the team is never overburdened. This way, they will tend to be at their best and proactively work on their responsibilities.