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Wednesday, August 10, 2022

TOP Structure - the Organizational Domain

 It sounds tautological that every organization needs organization - and yet, most companies are really bad at keeping themselves organized, and it hasn't gotten better with the advent of Remote Work.

Although it's technically correct that organization is non-value adding, it is essential to get organization right:



The Organizational Domain is the second core pillar 
in the TOP Structure


People

Do we have the right people in the right places, are they equipped and do they have the necessary support to succeed? People aren't just chess pieces we can freely move around on an org chart - they're individuals with needs and desires, and if we don't take care of our people, performance will decline.


Collaboration

Can our people collaborate efficiently and effectively? Are the right people in touch with each other? How much "telephone game" are we playing? Do we have policies that cause us to block one another? Do we optimize for utilization of individuals, or getting stuff done?


Learning

Do we get genuine learning from events, or are we continuously repeating the same mistakes? Do we have functioning feedback loops? Are we figuring out the levers for meaningful change, and do we turn all of this into action? And do we only focus on how we execute, or also what we work on, and how we think?


Why Organization often doesn't work

Especially project organizations and large "Programs" commonly neglect investing into working with people, improving collaboration or creating a learning environment.

Even "Agile" environments often delegate the responsibility for organization to the Scrum Master, although none of the items mentioned above can be done by a single person on a team - they're everybody's job: team members, support roles and management alike.


When the Organizational pillar isn't adequately represented, we quickly accumulate "organizational debt" - an unsustainable organization that becomes more and more complex, costly, slow, cumbersome and unable to deliver satisfactory outcomes.


Check your own team - on a scale from 1 to 10, how well are the above mentioned organizational aspects tended to?

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