Understanding the Whole

When a company is in the middle of an organizational change, it is sometimes difficult to understand your/others roles and the expectations. It's easy to stay with the comfortable old routines and do what you have always done. After all, you know what to do, you have done the same thing plenty of times before.

But here's the catch: what if things around you have changed? Things you know how to do might not deliver the value anymore the same way they used to. Or it can even be that the activity you keep on doing is creating a major pain for someone else in the organization.

Unfortunately I can't think of a good example where organs of living organisms were scrambled, but with organizations this can happen. And then it doesn't really work out well if the lungs still think they are fingers and forget to breath. It might have severe consequences even though they are still able to type like they used to. Like in the good old times.

Break the old habits! If you have been assigned to a new role, check what's really expected from you. Are you a muscle cell doing some heavy lifting or should you be concentrated on thinking about the future like the rest of the brain cells? How does your work affect the whole?

Knitting Processes Together

Interfacing is hard. Even if you take a simple example, (well, maybe not really that simple) a software development team and think about how the information flows from the original customer requirement to an implemented feature. Here I'm assuming that there is one Scrum Team developing one product.

First there is an interface between the customer and the Product Owner. The Product Owner interprets the requirements and maybe writes them down as a User Story in the Backlog. Then the Development Team starts working with the requirements and refine them with the Product Owner's assistance. Finally they implement a new piece of functionality. Something that is hopefully close to what the customer originally wanted.

Probably many have experienced cases where everything didn't go according to the customer's plans. Product or service did not meet the expectations. Fortunately this earlier mentioned development process can be improved by collaborating and working closely with the customer. But still, things tend to get a bit harder when you scale.

Depending on how you (or some others) choose to shape your organization, you might have a set of small start-ups where every team can do pretty much everything. But quite often your operations are modelled by separating different functions and processes. And I don't think it's always bad. I'm not really that into accounting, so I prefer someone else doing that for me. Or even thought I like interacting with customers, I'm perfectly fine with someone else closing the deals and me just providing some cool new functionality.

In addition to the different functional roles, there are processes applied in these functions. And these processes interact. In sales function there's the sales process and in R&D the software development process. One of the most common pitfalls in process oriented companies are the interfaces.

Even if you apply the idea of Continuous Improvement, you are usually just optimizing one process. And even if you have a state-of-the-art software development machinery it makes no difference if you cannot get the products to customers. Or if your sales or marketing cannot find your customers and make them aware of your superb new products.

The approach I have recently been involved with is the so called Value Chains. Instead of concentrating only on the individual processes, you take a helicopter view and think about the whole chain of actions from customer need to customer satisfaction. And then examine closely also the interfaces between the processes.

Of course this approach requires a healthy amount of collaboration between the functions. And maybe someone to pay attention to the whole. Quite often we tend to just stay in our little silos and see everyone outside as, well, outsiders. But get past that! Go to lunch with your buddies at sales or go have a cup of coffee with some people working in customer service. Or if you don't know anyone there yet, go and make some new friends!