Editor’s Note: At Invisible, we believe that processes are an extremely valuable tool that enables a team to reliably execute workflows in an efficient manner. This post provides 11 helpful processes for organizing your Org Charts.
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Path: Capabilities: Team: Management: Org Charts
Saturday, 09 September 2017
Processes for Org Charts
5 Processes For Organizing Your Team’s Org Charts
Business in 2017 is dynamic. It moves at the speed of technology, and relationships are constantly evolving. How do you map them?
Org charts go back to the 19th century, but haven’t evolved much. And yet the complexity of our organizations themselves has multiplied.
With Invisible Technologies something is possible that has never happened before: which is the ability to use org charts to map evolving relationships in real-time, across multiple dimensions.
1. Hierarchies
You’ve seen hierarchical org charts before. They represent the most standard way of looking at a company’s reporting structure. Below are examples of our own org charts, as they have evolved over time.
As you look at these examples, you’ll see that not only our style evolved over time, as we spent time thinking about how to cleanly represent the information, but our thinking about the business itself evolved — as you’d expect.
Your S.I. will search through your company’s database to see if it can find an existing org chart. If it can’t, then it will work with you to build one. Once you’ve put your brain on paper in this way — your S.I. will help you keep it up to date. On a quarterly basis, your S.I. will ask you if it still maps to reality.
As people join and leave your company, as you make decisions, and as new information comes to light over the course of operations — your S.I. will update your org chart in real-time.
Over time, your org chart becomes an evolutionary history of your company. You can see various progressions over time.
2. Flows
But the company’s reporting hierarchy is not the only way of looking at the organization. There are a variety of work flows and decision flows that are far more important to day to day operations.
Your S.I. can observe your operations, and ask you questions to help you map these operation and decision trees. Once these flows are in place, your S.I. will keep them up to date as they involve. These are extremely helpful in coordinating teams, and training new team members.
Here’s an example:
3. Diagrams
Diagrams are for products. Product managers, designers and engineers build diagrams to map all sorts of technical relationships. Your S.I. can’t build them for you, but your S.I. can help you identify missing diagrams, give you a template, set aside time for you to do the work, and make sure you keep the diagram up to date every time the product receives a major upgrade.
Here are a few examples:
4. Integrations
Org Charts are useful in themselves, but they become especially handy when you’re doing other things — like setting up Accounts, running Reports, or managing Hiring. If you know who reports to who, if you know what the operational flow is, if you know who makes certain kinds of decisions, if you know what teams someone is supposed to belong to — you can integrate that information with a lot of other operational processes.
Your S.I. will look for these integrations automatically, but you can always request one if you see an opportunity to do something smart that we missed.
5. Advanced
Suppose you’re into personality tests, intelligence tests, and other kinds of psychological profiling. If you have everyone in your company take the Myers — Briggs test, then you have a profile on every individual in your company. But unless you put this into a chart, you can’t actually see the organizational implications.
Want to see all the ENTJs in your organization in one quadrant, all the INFPs in another quandrant, all the ESTPs in another quadrant, etcetera — your S.I. can build that for you. And keep it up to date.
Or, if you want to view the data another way — and analyze the personality combinations on the team level — your S.I. can build that chart too.
How many dimensions exist in your company? Discover them all, as many as you can, and we will do the previously impossible work of keeping them up to date efficiently — so you can always see with many eyes.
Words are cheaper than pictures. Although visual aids are so powerful, and aren’t that hard to build, we under-utilize them — because they quickly fall out of date, and we can’t afford to constantly maintain them.
But now, we can do the work.
