Organizational structure and process for successful collaboration
January 28, 2022 2:01 PM Subscribe
I’m looking for articles, books, frameworks and ideas to help me think about and build organizational structures and processes that value teamwork and collaboration. Can you help?
I’ve been at a software company for 8 years, since the beginning, and we are now hitting our stride in the market. This is great, and has brought a lot of opportunities and excitement. It also means the headcount is growing significantly, and the organizational challenges are growing.
My department specifically (product) just brought on a new PM who we are excited about integrating into the team. New hire, great, but now we are in need of a lot more structure and process (and likely also in need of more hires) so we can operate at the level we need to (and want to).
This is a good problem to have, but I’ve been struggling with the other senior person on this team. As we’ve discussed how to build the team, what roles/process/responsibilities might look like, he’s been very focused on individual responsibilities while I am much more inclined to think about things collaboratively.
As an example, we have feature requests that come in from the customer support team — he frames this as “they will talk with the PM and the PM will traffic the work the the correct places”. In my mind, all the questions that may come up from a request from CS are likely too big and touch on too many possible implications for one person to be the sole respondent to. If I were structuring this, I would say something like “CS will have queue of feature requests that the product team triages – the PM is responsible for making sure this happens, but key aspects of the decision-making are shared and collaborative”.
On some level this could be a question of semantics — he is speaking more of roles/responsibilities on paper, while maybe I’m considering more how the work actually gets done. But it’s been a conflict because we can’t quite find our way to speaking the same language. From observing this person over the years I do think he is not as organizationally, systemically, or relationally minded as I think the company needs right now (whereas for many years the more individual mindset worked well enough).
Through these (not very successful) discussions, I’ve realized that though I myself am organizationally, systemically and relationally minded, I don’t have a grounding in specific ideas within organizational/management thought that could help me think through these issues.
So, where can I look for ideas on how to think about and talk about organizational structures and processes that foreground collaborative work, that understand how trust is built and maintained within/across teams, and recognizes that critical organizational decisions need to be shared on some level? How do successful collaborative organizations or teams do it, and how do they talk about it?
- Note that I'm not looking for more radical democratic or consensus-based approaches to organizational structure, though I am definitely intrigued by those in general. I think my question is more basic: sure X person may be officially responsible for Y output, but talking about it or structuring it as "they are a node who has inputs and outputs" doesn't make sense when the questions and work at hand is complex or requires collaboration, and will turn the org into a bunch of overworked and under-connected individuals. So how DO you talk about it or structure it to support teamwork? Maybe even saying "X person is responsible for Y output" is the wrong place to start??
I’ve been at a software company for 8 years, since the beginning, and we are now hitting our stride in the market. This is great, and has brought a lot of opportunities and excitement. It also means the headcount is growing significantly, and the organizational challenges are growing.
My department specifically (product) just brought on a new PM who we are excited about integrating into the team. New hire, great, but now we are in need of a lot more structure and process (and likely also in need of more hires) so we can operate at the level we need to (and want to).
This is a good problem to have, but I’ve been struggling with the other senior person on this team. As we’ve discussed how to build the team, what roles/process/responsibilities might look like, he’s been very focused on individual responsibilities while I am much more inclined to think about things collaboratively.
As an example, we have feature requests that come in from the customer support team — he frames this as “they will talk with the PM and the PM will traffic the work the the correct places”. In my mind, all the questions that may come up from a request from CS are likely too big and touch on too many possible implications for one person to be the sole respondent to. If I were structuring this, I would say something like “CS will have queue of feature requests that the product team triages – the PM is responsible for making sure this happens, but key aspects of the decision-making are shared and collaborative”.
On some level this could be a question of semantics — he is speaking more of roles/responsibilities on paper, while maybe I’m considering more how the work actually gets done. But it’s been a conflict because we can’t quite find our way to speaking the same language. From observing this person over the years I do think he is not as organizationally, systemically, or relationally minded as I think the company needs right now (whereas for many years the more individual mindset worked well enough).
Through these (not very successful) discussions, I’ve realized that though I myself am organizationally, systemically and relationally minded, I don’t have a grounding in specific ideas within organizational/management thought that could help me think through these issues.
So, where can I look for ideas on how to think about and talk about organizational structures and processes that foreground collaborative work, that understand how trust is built and maintained within/across teams, and recognizes that critical organizational decisions need to be shared on some level? How do successful collaborative organizations or teams do it, and how do they talk about it?
- Note that I'm not looking for more radical democratic or consensus-based approaches to organizational structure, though I am definitely intrigued by those in general. I think my question is more basic: sure X person may be officially responsible for Y output, but talking about it or structuring it as "they are a node who has inputs and outputs" doesn't make sense when the questions and work at hand is complex or requires collaboration, and will turn the org into a bunch of overworked and under-connected individuals. So how DO you talk about it or structure it to support teamwork? Maybe even saying "X person is responsible for Y output" is the wrong place to start??
You might like the book Team Topologies. I've seen it recommended by a lot of high-level engineers lately. (Caveat: Haven't read it myself, yet.)
posted by xil at 5:22 PM on January 28, 2022
posted by xil at 5:22 PM on January 28, 2022
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Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) is the fortnightly iteration of Scrum methodology with team-of-teams collaboration, and Scaled Agile Inc have a whole playbook (Scaled Agile for Enterprise) for onboarding an organisation starting with delivery teams through product management to customer support. There's a lot in SAfE, it looks like the best ideas industry veterans have seen and synthesized into a system for reliable delivery, regular information sharing and teams owning their commitments to make the things they're responsible for making.
(Work has paid for me to have the Scaled Agile "SAfE Practice Consultant" certificate, which some people use as a basis of a consultancy practice coaching organisations and agilists to adopt better systems and change how they work. If I'm ever your trainer, we already work together.)
posted by k3ninho at 2:50 PM on January 28, 2022 [2 favorites]