A chosen or imposed organization?
Every company has an organization (structure) that tends to guide the interactions between its members. These same interactions circulate information and guide the work performed.
The definition, implementation and maintenance of the organization over time can be controlled by its head, but can also evolve organically and decentralized over the years within large structures. Whichever way this organization evolves, it will always have an effect on the flow of information and work. This effect on organizational capacity is therefore not negligible.
If this organization is important, then it's important not to suffer from it, and to make choices that put the structure in a good position to achieve its goals.
Just like the formations of the Roman legions, the tactics of team sports teams or the air formations of the French air force, arranging the same units differently enables us to deal with different situations.
The question then arises: what kind of organization should we adopt?
No good choice without a goal #StartWithWhy
To find the right organization, you need to know what you want to achieve with the system you want to reorganize. Faster delivery? More learning? A greater wealth of opinions? Lower costs?
Whatever the motivation or objective behind an organizational change, it's vital to formalize it, since it's this element that will guide subsequent organizational choices.
In our example, we have chosen to reduce time-to-market.
But how can Org Topologies™ contribute to this?
Org Topologies™ offers a lightweight tool for mapping and evaluating one's organization in order to envision the desired direction of organizational change.
Quite simply, it's a thinking tool for taking a step into organizational design.
The key tool in Org Topologies™ is a two-dimensional map with one dimension representing the scope of capabilities and a second representing the scope of work.
Simplifying the 4x4 matrix into a 2x2 matrix makes it easier to get started:
Where do we stand today?
Before determining an improvement path, it is necessary to draw up a faithful representation of the organization as it is at the start of the reflections.
For this, we can use the Org Topologies™ map.
In the image below, you can see an example of our organization for which we want to accelerate time-to-market.
This example is a hypothetical case based on multiple cases I've observed in the field.
Note that for simplicity's sake, there is only one "Scrum team". This may correspond to the development of a small product. If there are several "Scrum teams", they may not all be placed in the same place on the map.
(I use quotation marks around Scrum team because these teams are not really fully multidisciplinary).
Consider organizational adaptations
Once we've assessed the situation, it's time to make some changes.
In our case, we want to reduce our time-to-market.
At present, there is a backlog between the analysis group, the "Scrum team" and production.
We hypothesize that bringing these people together into a single team will speed up the chain, and therefore time-to-market.
After this modification, we have a Scrum team with all the skills needed to go from analysis to production. This team has therefore been upgraded to A3: Rapid throughput unit with a focus on functionalities.
One might ask why this Scrum team isn't moving up to B3. The reason is that the Product Owner of this team is not invested in the business area at the moment. The business group, which is in B1, is carrying out preparatory work, which means that in this case, the Product Owner does not have responsibility for the business area.
Measure the effectiveness of your change in relation to the objective
Since any change in a human environment involves a high degree of uncertainty, it makes sense to evaluate the effect of changes made in the organization a posteriori.
Firstly, it's essential to measure the indicator we're aiming to improve with our organizational changes to see how relevant the modifications have been.
While this first indicator to be measured may seem obvious, I'd also like to stress the importance of measuring other indicators to assess effects that were originally unforeseen.
In our example, we wanted to reduce time-to-market. By measuring it before and one month after the organizational change, we found that we had reduced it by 20% - brilliant!
But what about the quality of deliverables, the value provided, employee satisfaction? Our organization is a complex system (with a lot of uncertainty), which means that it's difficult (impossible, in fact) to predict the consequences of any action, no matter how well-intentioned.
To strike a balance between the various indicators, using Scrum.org's Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework can be a good way to ensure rigorous experimentation and a balance between value indicators and organizational capacity indicators.
Referring to EBM, we will divide our indicators into two main categories, themselves divided into two sub-categories, called key value areas (KVA):
Market value: Current value (CV), Unrealized value (UV)
Organizational capacity: Ability to innovate (A2I), Time-to-market (T2M)
So, in our case, Time-to-market is in the spotlight. We can, for example, track Lead Time or Mean time to Restore (taken from DORA metrics).
To ensure balance, we then need measures in other key value areas such as :
user satisfaction for Present Value
potential market share for Unrealized Value
bug trends for Capacity for Innovation
The use of Org Topologies™ coupled with EBM will surely be the subject of a future article.
It's important to note that, depending on the modifications made, the effects may take longer or be more or less difficult to observe.
Conclusion
It's a good idea to adapt the organization of your company, your business unit, a group of teams developing a product, to best achieve your objectives. Org Topologies™ offers an interesting tool for assessing the situation and outlining the changes needed to achieve your objectives.
It's then experimentation and regular measurement of organizational performance that makes it possible to navigate uncertainty, with the Org Topologies™ map to draw one's experiences.
All the steps presented earlier can be carried out with different populations. There's a world of difference between doing this exercise alone in a room, or doing it in the presence of all the people present in the device under study. Neither extreme seems relevant to me. To select the people, I suggest you have both people in the lowest archetypes (Y & A) as well as in the highest archetypes (B & C), in order to cross the perspectives, which can be quite different.
This experience report presents a personal view on the change story by the credited writer. Should you have alternative views or additional details about this particular company's change story, please do not hesitate to contact Org Topologies and submit your version for publishing.
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