Is your company customer focused?
Should we move away from role based departments and move to customer based.
Customer focus, the obsession of the modern age. I've recently been reading lots of business books, nearly all of them talk about being able to react to customer needs; the market is unforgiving of those who don’t put the customer first and meet market demand. Some tell you that you need to predict what they’ll want in future.
“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” - Henry Ford
Lean and Agile
We’re all now lean and agile, we work in short iterations to deliver customer value. We've learnt of the tyranny of Taylorism or at least it’s Victorian interpretation and we say we've embraced customer collaboration over contract negotiatation. Taylorism optimised a company for efficiency of productivity, the agile manifesto’s top priority is to satisfy the customer through continuous delivery of software. Lean says to identify customers and specify value, build value streams with and end to end system that satisfies your identified customers.
Organisation Structure
Here’s an exercise for you, ask your nearest colleague or nearly anyone for that matter to draw their companies organisational structure for you. I’m going to guess you’ll see something like this.
Most people will start off with the CEO and work down. They’ll often divide into your companies various departments depending on the scale and complexity of your company, you’ll have divisions maybe based on geography or product.
Have you noticed what’s missing in all but a few diagrams, Customers. If your customers are so important why is it that they don’t feature in your organisational structure. You may say they’re an external factor, but surely they deserve a mention.
Departments
Even if your company has divisions you’ll often still find that within the division there is further subdivision into departments separated by functional role. As shown in the diagram above all the marketing experts are grouped in the marketing department, the developers naturally go in the information technology department, you get the idea. As the Wikipedia article describes this is often done to achieve efficiencies, but is this really the most efficient way to deliver value to your customers?
Specialisation and Sub specialisation
I’m a developer, so I’ll talk about the Technology department as an example. We have developers, sometimes grouped into back-end developers, front-end developers, you might even have middle-tier developers. More common you might have database developers, database administrators, testers, network operations experts and I must not forget designers and UX experts. With the advent of agile and other iterative methodologies the walls between these silos started to crumble. We all wax poetic about how we need to bring down the walls between the developers and the QA’s. Most companies have now done this I hope, and we’re all enjoying increased productivity and increased quality.
Multi-Disciplinary Teams
The latest craze, well a topic that is often cited as the way we want to move toward is devops or developer operations Wikipedia describes it as:
“stressing communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology professionals”.
We’re all having to come out from our functionally specialized groups and form multi-disciplinary teams. But still this team is only made up of people from within our own department. If we’re doing things properly we should have a product owner or product manager, this person at least should be from the department that your team is working for.
Misaligned Departments
Have you ever noticed how at any one point in time various departments seems to be doing completely different things with seemingly little in common? Marketing are in the midst of a re-brand, Sales are making millions selling a legacy product that technology has decided to deprecate in their move to node.js. The Product team are in the midst of a huge customer survey that has discovered Marketings choice of colour in the branding is likely to upset ninety eight percent of customers. I’ve recently been interviewing people from other departments to gain an understanding of what they care about and who they consider their customers. So how can we better align our companies and departments around our customers.
Customer Focused Departments
Instead of a company structure such as the first one we encountered, what if instead we built the company around our customers. Our first exercise would be to try and segment our customers into more specific groups. In my company there’s B2C, B2B and Suppliers. If you wonder where traditional departments like HR would go then maybe you could consider your employees a group of customers too.
Multi-disciplinary Departments
Now we have a team of people who have a much narrower focus than before, we still have the opportunity to have a mini marketing department but it is my hope that the marketing experts would closely align and work with the others in the team to best achieve the teams objectives namely meeting the customers demand.
Let’s see what happens
Whilst I was writing this my company announced that they were going to form a team like I've described here specifically targeted at B2C. We’re not going as far as doing suppliers and B2B but it’s an interesting start. I’m not going to be part of this team, but I’ll definitely be talking to the team to see how it goes. Watch this space and I’ll write a follow-up. Is there a tendency to just form a mini role based departments within the team? We’ll have to wait and see.
