Chapter 4: Introducing the Re/OrgSystem: A Systems Approach to Re/Organization
Having identified the problems in re/organizing an enterprise, we introduce an effective, proven, systematic approach. Because we will define work at every level, every person will understand where the re/organization is headed. They can then effectively help organize the enterprise as well as identify the organizational support needed to make the work efficient and effective.
We Need a Common Way to View and Define Work, so that Everyone Can Agree on the Best Re/Organization
Once an enterprise has identified what it wants to be as a business, then the organization or re/organization of that enterprise is primarily all about work. As we identified in Chapter 2, the following series of questions needs to be answered or more accurately, modeled:
"What is the work?"
"How is the work to be executed?"
"Who will do the work?"
"What will the organization look like?"
and
"How will the enterprise support work through a positive and healthy culture?"
These five questions will be abbreviated here, in order, as:
WHAT
HOW
WHO
ORGANIZATION and
ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT
Each of the questions will be answered (modeled) in the above order because the answer to each forms the basis for those that follow. This is the procedure for obtaining alignment. The Re/OrgSystem, as we call it, will be described and illustrated through a sample re/organization the authors previously facilitated for a medium-sized enterprise.
The five-stage Re/OrgSystem will help the organization accept and optimize re/organization, rather than resisting hard-to-understand changes decided by the few.
You will come to see that one of the most striking virtues of this five-step system is that the tasks needed to accomplish each step can be completed in a reasonable time frame. Because the decision-making is based on clear, transparent models of work, consensus and adjustments are easy. The organization will not stop, stall or lurch into re/org after re/org, but will smoothly flow toward maximum work execution, desired results and the best possible outcome.
The Re/OrgSystem
The Way to Alignment, Transparency and Continuous Improvement
The Re/OrgSystem is a logical path through the business that defines, describes, and models interrelated work to achieve desired business ends. The first four stages will be described in this chapter and the fifth in a subsequent chapter. A graphic representation of the system is shown here.
Addressing the WHAT of the Enterprise
Model: The Business Unit
The existence of any business depends on identifying the foundation the enterprise intends to rests on in its effort to achieve its goals. This is as true for a team, a department, and a division as it is for an entire company.
WHAT does the organization want to be and how will it distinguish itself, if desired, from others like it?
Many resources are available on goal-setting, determining vision/mission, developing strategic plans, determining the organization's driving force and competitive advantage, and other topics fundamental to the organization's identity. No one has crystallized this better perhaps than James Collins, in his book From Good to Great (2001). The book is based on solid research regarding what constitutes success in both the profit and the nonprofit worlds. He also addresses how to distinguish your business from the competition and become not just good, but great. It's highly recommended reading from our point of view. There are others as well, and they will help you have a solid understanding of how to define what we label the "Strategy & Business Plans," the foundation of the organization or re/organization of any business unit. Typical input to a business includes, but is not limited to:
Listing business inputs is, of course, not sufficient for ensuring a well-defined organization, nor does the list ensure the alignment essential to achieving business ends. The real difficulty, usually missed by all but the most perspicacious of executives, is a specific operational understanding of how these business inputs will be achieved.
As the beginning element of the Re/OrgSystem, a business unit is an operational definition of WHAT the business is (now) or will be (in the future). It is what the executives (founders, partners, board or directors, owners, etc.) define as their operational understanding of the business at a high level. This includes what the business is to achieve as outputs and consequences, as well as how it works to achieve them organizationally (subject to later change). As with all the levels of work related to implementation and organization, we will be using the Language of Work ModelTM to achieve our ends of defining operational work, establishing consensus and providing clarity for everyone in the enterprise—at this level especially by and for the senior management. We will detail the Language of Work ModelTM shortly.
Business units are found in all sizes. In the past, we've used the analogy of American football to illustrate the levels of a business. Thus, in professional football, the business unit is the franchise; one of the several core processes is the playing of the game (others are sales, marketing, drafting, etc.); the jobs are the actual tasks of various players, coaches and support personnel; the organization (of teams and management) is represented by the offense, defense, special teams and how they are coached (managed); and, finally, the organizational support is all that the organization provides (e.g., from stadium to uniforms to compensation and such) to help everyone play the game in the best possible manner.
Large corporations—the size of a Microsoft or a General Motors, for instance—have many business units and an overarching major business unit. For small businesses, the line between business unit and core processes can merge. The important question here is not the business size (because they can all be defined the same way with lesser or greater levels of complexity), but what the business wants to do to achieve its intended ends. Once it has defined what it is (present business) and/or what it wants to be (future business or desired state), it can then determine how—the core processes—it will achieve the what.
Business units, by the way, are normally defined by executives and other key personnel, who own and/or will be responsible for, overall business success. The definition, in this regard, is best done with a facilitator who uses as the means the Language of Work ModelTM (see Chapter 6). Use of a facilitator obviates the need for executives to lead the effort and eliminates any tendencies they might have toward falling back on previously established policies or prejudices. When executives who may have clashed in the past have an opportunity to assert authority or defend territory during a re/org, the process may be fatally slowed or sidetracked. A facilitator provides the objectivity to speed a more neutral modelling process.
Addressing HOW Work Will Be Done
Model: The Core Processes
Business Process Reengineering has had more attention devoted to it in the last 15 to 20 years than any other business improvement methodology. Process Reengineering, Lean Manufacturing, BPR and ERP are common approaches used by many businesses to define core processes. Some have been quite successful; many have been marginally so. Even those that have been successful have usually been accomplished with much angst and cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, euros or yen.
While useful and much needed, nearly all such process change efforts have been shown to suffer from the same problems: lack of systematic attention to jobs and/or teams designed to implement the process changes; varying forms of isolation of affected employees from the analytic process (thereby imperiling acceptance); entirely too much detail for operational benefit; and/or inadequate or tacked-on change management.
Since HOW must be done, it is imperative to use means commensurate with those for the other levels of business, such as jobs, work groups and the business unit. Thus core processes must be modeled the same way as the business unit. In turn, when jobs are modeled, they must operationalize the core processes and show specifically where changes are needed. They must also provide sufficient data as to what and how the changes can be effected. We will discuss this further when defining jobs (and other levels and layers of work) using the Language of Work ModelTM.
Basically, the missing ingredient for organizing or re/organizing an enterprise has always been a way to define and align the core processes with an understanding of the business unit on the front end and on the back end with jobs and organization. Alignment is not achieved solely by carefully linking goals and objectives with well-defined strategies. Alignment can only be achieved by the use of a behavioral model that accurately reflects how work is done in the business. This requires the Language of Work Model(tm), based on behavioral principles. We are going to describe, therefore, a very operational approach that naturally leads to work alignment.
How is the business going to accomplish what it wants to accomplish? How are the "ops" folks going to operationally define how they want things done, and will this be consistent with what the executives want?
Executives tend to understand the organization at the "business/finance" level. So long as re/orgs are conducted without a systematic process for integrating the WHAT of executive knowledge with the HOW of operations, the WHO of workers/jobs and the ORGANIZATION of teams, re/organization will fail, because successful alignment is critical.
Once we have successfully aligned the WHAT (the business unit level) with the HOW (the core processes level), we can then align individual jobs to these two levels so that they work in concert with one another.
Addressing the WHO of Work
Model: The Jobs
We have consistently found that individual employees know their own work well. However, intrinsically knowing the job and communicating it to others is not the same, especially when it comes to the information needed for re/organization. But because such information is crucial, businesses need a better way to define individual work—jobs—to align them to core processes. Current means like job descriptions will not suffice, nor does relying on the core processes (i.e., so called, "swim lanes") alone to communicate intended individual and team tasks (as is often the case in SAP installations, for example).
Individual jobs arise in most businesses in a generally haphazard manner. Businesses have identified work that must be accomplished, so they hire someone with what they believe is the right background, experience, personality and drive to do the work. Or they provide training in various forms to fill in the skills required in the execution of jobs. Job titles and so-called job descriptions often drive what is sought in hiring workers, along with judgment about perceived job requirements.
This is pretty much to say that jobs are filled without much real regard for the core processes they are to execute. Processes are defined one way—or not at all—and jobs are defined another. Thus there can be little real operational work alignment between core processes and jobs, just as between the business unit and core processes.
Consequently, an organization ends up with many workers who are confused in varying degrees as to the value of their work, unhappy with what they do, missing some of the skills needed or unable to identify and communicate with others how to make their jobs better fit with the overall enterprise. Even managers may not know exactly what their workers are or should be doing. Inefficiency abounds. Gossip and "politics" are rife. People who understand their work and how they fit into the enterprise's strategic mission have neither time nor patience for pettiness.
There is a way to better understand and improve your own work, and to make it function in operational alignment with core processes and the business unit. When this is done, managers are better able to manage those who work under them. This better way is called "job modeling," and it is a key element in organizing or re/organizing business.
Addressing the ORGANIZATION of Work
Model: Teams, Management, and the Org Chart
Just as jobs must be aligned with core processes, which must in turn be aligned with business units, teams must be aligned with the jobs, core processes and business unit as well. That requires an operational model of work, which, as we've said, we call the Language of Work ModelTM.
A team should be a group of jobs with a set of common outputs and consequences that are facilitated by its managers/team leaders. Teams, or work groups, in large part determine what the organizational structure will be.
Once the teams or work groups are defined, we can identify and further define the management positions they will need. As a last step, identifying and developing the organization chart would then be relatively easy, since we know precisely and have aligned the WHAT, HOW, WHO, and teams and management of ORGANIZATION. The org chart is best revealed and structured at the end of this step—not the beginning of the whole Re/OrgSystem, as is most often done in traditional re/organization.
Chapter summary:
You will note that each of the four stages above was defined in alignment with the others; using the same work model. All employees and managers thus come to clearly understand with others how the work is intended to flow and be organized and managed. Everyone uses a common view of work. The means a Language of Work Model(tm) clearly and perfectly aligns the work at each of the stages. As this is done, all those affected within the organization participate in a user-friendly, inclusive process, and the re/org can be accepted with as little disruption to ongoing operations as possible.
The Re/OrgSystem also helps achieve transparency in the enterprise. Everyone will know what the work is and who does it. Your work outputs will be someone else's work inputs, and your inputs will be from some else's outputs.
Finally, as to cost and time of transition, you will be pleased to know that the Re/OrgSystem won't take an inordinate amount of time, money or personnel to implement. The process incorporates change on the go, as an integral part of managing the transition to a new structure based on the needs of the work that has been modeled.
Note: The key to any and all definition of work at various levels is to move from the implicit (what we think we know about work) to the explicit (operational models of work) so that everyone understands the enterprise in terms of WHAT, HOW, WHO, ORGANIZATION, and SUPPORT. It is only in this way that re/organizing will achieve alignment, transparency and continuous improvement.