Organization complexity is a waste farm
by Simon Baker, 10 February 2012 | The Agile Blogosphere
This post is from Energized Work | agile in action by Simon Baker. Click here to see the original post in full.
When people are pooled in specialized silos more process is required to get things done. Responsibility gets diffused and transaction and coordination costs go up because there are more handovers and sign-offs as work is passed around; more meetings are needed to keep people involved and informed, and it’s more difficult to gather people together; it’s more time consuming to chase people for responses. Work is stop-start. There’s little flow and lots of waste.This setup is a common organization design in the drive for greater efficiency. Unfortunately it’s really great at increasing operational complexity, which works against both effectiveness and efficiency. The complexity requires people to do more work that doesn’t add value and it does a bloody good job at hiding the associated costs. These costs may be greater than any savings made through improved efficiency but it’s unlikely anybody actually knows for sure one way or the other. Worse, the complicated organization structure typically gets reflected in the architectural design of the software solutions produced. Conway’s Law basically.
John Seddon points out that managing costs causes costs go up. I think companies should be simplifying organization structure by dismantling silos and removing waste. One model we’ve used successfully is to have a value stream for each product or service,...read more
This is a very topical and timely post for me! Couldn’t agree more.
Kelly.