A novel and agile Enterprise-Level IT Organization

Jaroslav Bláha
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read

Challenge: Establish an agile, future-proof IT organization across a large number of globally dispersed, independent operating entities. With IT assets being themselves matrix-wise distributed across those business units (BUs).

Fallacy: “For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.” (H.L. Mencken) The classical solution would be a hierarchical structure following the ITIL disciplines/processes. Unfortunately, management and task allocation, issue escalation, and coordination between teams across such a multi-dimensional business organization with an overlaying IT hierarchy would be an inefficient nightmare. In particular the necessary huge number of middle-managers would be costly and non-productive. (As a basic rule, middle managers do not produce — they attempt to translate between a top-level mission and people that actually do productive work. This translation is mostly wasteful and prohibits agility.)

Approach: To find a structure that actually might work within the given constraints, the leadership team did the following:

  • Allocated the problem to the middle managers (yes — exactly those that should be somehow transitioned to increase efficiency) and let them find a promising structure in loosely moderated workshops.
  • Provided input material, e.g about possible structures (Kanban, Spotify Model, Holacracy, …) and mind-opening literature (“It’s Your Ship”, “Extreme Ownership”, “The Phoenix Project”, …) from which to shamelessly borrow whatever might be useful.
  • Let the IT associates identify guiding principles upfront.

From the latter, ten tenets evolved, of which the most important are:

  • Replace hierarchy by flat structures
  • Replace top-down control by horizontal democracy and responsibility
  • Build groups that work autonomously with agility and ownership of a specific domain
  • A learning organization, which prevents knowledge silos
  • Work is not allocated top-down by push, but directly by pull from qualified individuals. (Naturally, there might be exceptions in e.g. emergency situations.)

In summary, the middle managers have made themselves superfluous. (Spoiler: None of them left; instead they fully embraced their new possibilities as empowered team members.)

Solution: The resulting structure has been successfully piloted across EMEA/APAC with ca. 130 associates and those main elements:

  • Each employee belongs to exactly one Tribe, which is the group of people residing in one country.
  • A Tribe is supported by one Facilitator, who takes care of country-specific bureaucracy (payroll, contracts, work environment, … in conjunction with local HR and Finance), but is otherwise not hierarchically superior.
  • Currently 15 Guilds that each cover one specific domain of expertise and service (e.g. security, networking, datacenter operations, …) irrespective of location. The idea follows the traditional guild concept in that a prospective member must demonstrate her/his qualification before being accepted by the guild’s members (i.e. not a specific boss). As a continuous “hygienic” factor, Guilds encourage personal growth and enforce high professional standards.
  • A Coordinator per Guild who has an escalation or prioritization role in exceptional cases. Under normal circumstances all Guild members are qualified and empowered to pull work from the available list of tasks and to solve it autonomously.
  • Each Guild has a Collaboration Tool or channel (e.g. Slack) for open information exchange amongst its members (and beyond).
  • Given proper qualifications, each person can be actively member of up to three Guilds. With that, close collaboration across Guilds, information exchange, and professional enrichment are inherently assured.
  • Each person can be passive member in any Guild(s) and monitor its status and information to create widest-possible awareness. (I.e. no secrets, no information obfuscation by middle management, no communication delays.) Given acceptable qualification, a passive member can grow into an active membership.

Pre-condition: This should be common and obvious, still

  • Hire qualified and hungry people;
  • Trust them to do their job;
  • Give them a clear mission, from which they can derive their Guilds’ objectives.

Result: After six months of experience in the new structure (and minor adaptations from lessons-learned), the proven benefits are:

  • Increased motivation and quality of work; in correlation with reduced personnel attrition.
  • Improved reaction time to incidents and work requests through pull by experts empowered to act on their own.
  • Higher productivity by the same group of people due to reduction in communication losses and delays, as well as increased efficacy of former middle managers.
  • Almost total removal of reporting effort as a benefit from continuous open communication (currently residual ca. one PPT slide per month per Guild). Drastical reduction in time and effort for alignment and status meetings.

I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to Friedrich Rub and William (Billy) Campbell who have facilitated this incredible transformation, as well as the Solera Global-IT team EMEA/APAC that has made this possible and is doing a phantastic job in the new environment.

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