My career and skill sets have evolved from being a technologist who developed software applications, to an entrepreneur who built and sold a successful global consulting organization. In my twenty four years of technical and operational experience, I have designed & built software applications, led dozens of engagements, and established a proven track record of building and leading engaged and motivated teams while successfully delivering strategic business value through technology solutions.
I've been helping emerging companies evolve from a handful of people and ad-hoc processes to mature product delivery organizations since 2002. I am passionate about technology, design, and working with smart individuals. This passion has directed my focus to engage with early stage ideas & companies in order to create & grow something that did not previously exist. Along the way, I've taken up photography and designing & selling t-shirts or as I like to call them b-shirts.
Improve the efficiency of your team simply by changing the way you organize and think about your work. Organizations are typically composed of separate functional groups/departments that perform specific functions. Most organizations are setup this way regardless of their size or industry. Within these departments, there are the people that make the decisions (managers) and then there are the people that do the work (team). The managers are held accountable for the output of their team. Smaller departments roll up into a larger department. Those larger department then rolls up into another department and so on. Until you get to the very top, which is headed up by the elite executive team. The executive team is then responsible for the output of the entire organization. In this typical corporate structure, each department has it’s own management structure and team with their own goals & priorities. I’m sure that this isn’t ground breaking news for anyone, we’ve all seen this before.
The work within an organization is divided based on the function of the department and more specifically the role individuals play within that department. Managers define the work, the team executes on it. This is not to say that the managers don’t execute themselves, it just highlights that the team usually isn’t involved in the decision making process. Looking in from the outside, this all looks fairly normal and a good way to operate. You have people with specialized skills functioning within those parameters. This works really well in an ideal situation when there is enough work within each department to keep everyone 100% utilized.
Experience shows however that that there isn’t an ideal environment, there is always flux, especially in the services industry. All organizations experience this flux, which creates availability in one department while leaving a deficit in another. In most cases the groups that have an abundance of work will try to increase their team size, while the groups that don’t have enough work will either try to reduce theirs or will have availability which doesn’t add value to the organization. Availability should be viewed as inventory, you want just enough to service the current needs. Too much or too little inventory costs an organization money. There is enormous waste in individual departments continually trying to manage their own resourcing needs/constraints.
Well what else can be done, this is just the way it works. Every company faces this problem. The problem might exist for every company, but that doesn’t mean that you should try to solve it the same way as everyone else.
The problem here isn’t how the teams/departments are structured, but how the work is divided and assigned. It turns out that this problem has already been solved, just in a slightly different context. Principals within lean manufacturing can be applied at the corporate/department levels. Instead of creating work based on functional groups/departments an alternative is to create and organize the work based task & priority. Many in the software development community have already embraced this new approach and have been applying it successfully towards their projects. Focusing the team on the tasks and priorities for the organization, puts the responsibility on the entire team not just the department heads. Teams will then organize around the task as opposed to their function, promoting cross functional collaboration. This approach allows the organization to leverage all of the skill sets of the team vs the specific function of their department. Not only can the organization take advantage of the untapped potential in their teams, but can prioritize the work based on what is going to add the most value to the company now. This now optimized the teams ability to add value and improved the overall organization efficiency.
The goal of this post is to create awareness of the problem. Subsequent posts will discuss specific things organizations can do to solve this problem.
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