Optimize team topology

Partition the collaboration graph into bounded teams while balancing preserved working relationships, skill coverage, membership stability, and fixed assignments.

What it's for

Reorganizations usually optimize the org chart. This optimizes the collaboration graph: it partitions teams while preserving working relationships, covering skills and limiting churn.

Turns organization and collaboration telemetry into a constrained, auditable team-design proposal rather than a cosmetic network chart.

What you give it

Inputs split into evidence read from your connected systems, calibration your team owns, and numerical controls that affect precision but never the result's meaning.

Field Type Role Required
change_penalty number ≥ 0 Your calibration Optional
collaboration_edges array of objects (3 fields) Evidence Yes
imbalance_penalty number ≥ 0 Your calibration Optional
iterations integer ≥ 100, ≤ 100000 Numerical control Optional
max_team_size integer ≥ 1 Your calibration Yes
min_team_size integer ≥ 1 Your calibration Yes
n_teams integer ≥ 2, ≤ 20 Your calibration Yes
required_skills_per_team array of string Evidence Optional
restarts integer ≥ 1, ≤ 100 Your calibration Optional
seed integer Numerical control Optional
skill_gap_penalty number ≥ 0 Your calibration Optional
units array of objects (4 fields) Evidence Yes

Each units record

Field Type Required
current_team integer (≥ 0) Optional
fixed_team integer (≥ 0) Optional
id string (non-empty) Yes
skills array of string Yes
Example input
{
  "change_penalty": 0.1,
  "collaboration_edges": [
    {
      "from_unit": "a",
      "to_unit": "b",
      "weight": 10
    },
    {
      "from_unit": "a",
      "to_unit": "c",
      "weight": 10
    },
    {
      "from_unit": "b",
      "to_unit": "c",
      "weight": 10
    },
    {
      "from_unit": "d",
      "to_unit": "e",
      "weight": 10
    },
    {
      "from_unit": "d",
      "to_unit": "f",
      "weight": 10
    },
    {
      "from_unit": "e",
      "to_unit": "f",
      "weight": 10
    }
  ],
  "iterations": 200,
  "max_team_size": 3,
  "min_team_size": 3,
  "n_teams": 2,
  "required_skills_per_team": [
    "backend",
    "frontend",
    "data"
  ],
  "restarts": 3,

Truncated for display — the full payload is 92 lines.

What you get back

This is the actual output of running the example above — computed by the same function the platform calls, not an illustration.

Example output
{
  "baseline_objective": 40,
  "collaboration_weight_retained": 1,
  "governance": {
    "decision_scope": "proposal_for_human_review",
    "note": "Validate ownership, accommodations, preferences, and delivery context before changing team membership.",
    "protected_traits_used": false
  },
  "method": "constrained_graph_partition_simulated_annealing_v1",
  "objective": {
    "cut_weight": 0,
    "membership_changes": 4,
    "missing_skill_slots": 0,
    "objective": 0.4,
    "size_imbalance": 0
  },
  "objective_improvement": 39.6,
  "search": {
    "accepted_moves": 13,
    "iterations_per_restart": 200,
    "restarts": 3,
    "seed": 9
  },
  "teams": [
    {
      "covered_required_skills": [
        "backend",
        "data",
        "frontend"
      ],
      "missing_required_skills": [],
      "size": 3,
      "team": 0,
      "unit_ids": [
        "a",
        "b",
        "c"
      ]
    },
    {
      "covered_required_skills": [
        "backend",
        "data",
        "frontend"

Truncated for display — the full payload is 56 lines.

How it works

Network & dependency analysis — Trace how load, failure and knowledge propagate through a graph of teams, services or components.

  1. 1 Partition the collaboration graph into bounded teams while balancing preserved working relationships, skill coverage, membership stability, and fixed assignments.
  2. 2 Evaluate the method-specific diagnostics and gates returned by the function, then abstain unless the declared decision clears them under locally governed thresholds.

Before you trust it

Every tool in the catalog ships with the conditions under which its answer is meaningful — and the conditions under which it should abstain instead of guessing.

Assumptions & guardrails

  • Nodes, edges, direction, time window, missing-link policy, and aggregation boundary represent the coordination or dependency mechanism of interest.
  • Structural centrality, fragility, or clustering describes a modeled graph and must not be interpreted as intent, guilt, or personal value.

Minimum evidence

  • units: required and organization-defined
  • collaboration_edges: required and organization-defined
  • n_teams: required and organization-defined
  • min_team_size: required and organization-defined
  • max_team_size: required and organization-defined

How to validate it

Validate on held-out periods or aggregate units, perturb edge definitions and missing links, and report sensitivity to graph construction before using structural rankings.

Calibrating it to your org

Same for everyone

The mathematical kernel, validation rules, method version, and JSON output semantics are organization-independent; no tenant-trained coefficients or company benchmark is embedded in the function.

Specific to you

  • metric/outcome definitions, entity grain, observation window, costs, thresholds, priors, and constraints represented by the function inputs

Calibration workflow

  1. 1 Define the management decision, target outcome, aggregate unit, privacy boundary, cadence, and prediction/intervention horizon for this organization.
  2. 2 Build a tenant-scoped historical cohort using only information available before each prediction or decision; preserve zero periods, censoring, assignment probabilities, and unresolved outcomes when the method requires them.
  3. 3 Estimate statistical parameters on training history, but obtain costs, utilities, risk tolerance, practical-effect thresholds, capacity, and policy constraints from accountable decision owners.
  4. 4 Validate on later time windows or held-out aggregate units at the deployment grain, against a simple baseline and the function-specific validation strategy.
  5. 5 Deploy only if the returned decision clears evidence, overlap, calibration, robustness, and guardrail checks; warning, unsupported, schema-gap, and fallback decisions are abstentions.
  6. 6 Monitor realized outcomes, data drift, coverage, and decision regret; recalibrate at a governed cadence or after a detected regime/definition change, never merely because a stakeholder dislikes the result.

Call it from your AI

You don't wire up 388 tools in your MCP client. The GitRevio MCP server exposes 18 tools, three of which let an agent search the catalog, read a tool's schema, and run it — so the assistant finds this one on its own.

gitrevio_capabilities_search
  { "q": "partition the collaboration graph into bounded" }
  → finds "optimize_team_topology"

gitrevio_capability_describe
  { "capability_id": "optimize_team_topology" }
  → returns the input schema and agent guidance shown on this page

gitrevio_capability_run
  { "capability_id": "optimize_team_topology", "arguments": { ... } }
  → returns the result shown above

Works in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, Goose and Aider. See the MCP server.

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