Org Structure Isn’t Everything in Org Design

A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a mi

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In effectively run organizations, the functional leader is responsible for “who” and “how”—providing trained people who are competent in their profession to be used in sequentialized flows. The flow owner (e.g., project leader, program leader, value stream leader) is responsible for the “what” and “when” of how those people are deployed to achieve

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By contrast, the further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate. The organizational design is also the architecture for how the company communicates with the outside world. For example, you might want to organize your sales force by product to maximize communication with the relevant product groups and maximize

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In order to implement strategy, an organization needs to integrate structure, processes, and people. A successful redesign will focus the company's resources on its strategic priorities and reduce costs. An example of a typical motivation for a redesign is a company that decided to expand outside of its US home base.