Advice Line | Bob Lewis » Making a forced reorganization work

January 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Making a forced reorganization work

TAGS: General

Dear Bob ...

I've read your column with much interest in the past, and now I'd like to ask for some advice.

I work at a medium-sized company (about 150 employees). Our IT area was recently split up - long story short, the CEO made the decision without consulting anyone, and we have to live with it. Now we've got 8 staff reporting to three different managers, and things are starting to fall through the cracks. For example, one group was dealing with a systemic network issue, which may have been causing problems for another group - and neither knew what the other was doing.

The directors of the three new departments report to the COO. The COO promoted the split as a way to have the staff focus on three different functional areas: one on 'typical' IT duties like network support, one on developing the infrastructure for a new hosted service we are offering, and the third on Web application development. Physically, we sit in three separate areas of one office (again, a decision of the COO).

But the departments couldn't hope to be completely independent. When I asked the COO how we were supposed to define exactly where one department ended and the next began, the COO just said that was something the department heads could work out.

Once the COO makes a decision, it's nearly impossible to get him to change his mind, even if there's evidence the decision wasn't a good one. He made the decision without my input, which obviously has me a little rankled. But at this point, I just want to try to make the best of the situation - and if I can't, then maybe it's time to go elsewhere.

Once upon a time, all the IT folks actually sat near one another, and it was easy to keep everyone in the loop. And it was easy to gather everyone around a table to brainstorm about current projects. Those days are gone.

It would be difficult to have everyone document everything they do, and logging everything in our ticketing system would only be a partial solution. I think the solution has to start with addressing some communication issues first, and then possibly finding a technology solution to assist. I'd appreciate your comments on where to start.

- Reorganized

Dear Reorganized ...

Okay, the CEO and COO blew it. From your description it sounds like they made one of the most common mistakes in management - expecting a reorganization to solve a problem without first thinking through what's broken in how the old organization performed the work, whether the new structure would fix the problems, and what problems the new structure would be likely to create.

In addition, they created an unnecessary layer of management - something that's guaranteed to cause problems. Three managers for eight employees (I presume you mean two of you manage three employees each; the other manages two) is a lot of people riding coaches pulled by too few horses.

The COO also gave you explicit instructions on what to do about it. He told you to work it out with the other two department heads. It's excellent advice.

To put some meat on the bones, I'd suggest the three of you lock yourselves in a conference room with a whiteboard for a day. What you have to solve isn't, however, communication assisted by technology. It's to figure out who's supposed to do what. So:

Start by taking inventory. Make a list of all of the work that has to get done. You're probably best off starting with some major categories, like "Administration and Governance," "Application Support" (projects and enhancements) and "Operations."

Once you have a reasonably complete inventory, divvy it up. One convenient format for this is called a "RACI" chart, for "Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed" (you can probably combined "responsible" and "accountable" to simplify life). Make the columns the departments, the rows are the responsibilities, and the cell entries are R, C or I.

For some responsibilities you'll find that more than one department must be responsible. If that's the case, either:

• Assign it arbitrarily.
• Figure out how to separate it into two separate responsibilities (web operations vs WAN operations).
• Clearly define where one department's responsibility ends and the other's begins, or,
• Establish a cross-functional team to deal with it.

If you tried, instead, to fix this by relying on improving communication, you'd be relying on courtesy, and asking employees to figure out, one instance at a time, who ought to know about what. That usually works, but only up to the point where time pressures enter into the picture. Then, communication is the first thing to go. Oh ... also when employees are feeling territorial, which is usually the case when nobody knows who is supposed to do what.

- Bob

Posted by Bob Lewis on January 18, 2007 04:32 AM

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