The Purpose of Organizational Design

Successful Organisations are generally aligned across the organisation with clearly understood goals and desired outcomes including how they will be measured. They also and most importantly understand the People that they have, the work that they are doing and ensure the work is the right work to achieve the desired outcome.

They also understand that their people work together in more cross-functional team designs, enabling these teams become responsible for a deliverable outcome aligning to customer needs and the organisations strategic goal

As an organisation increases in size it is not uncommon for collections of teams to be brought together in to form a "team of teams" known as Groups, Tribes or Domains. The naming changes based on the adopted taxonomy of the organisation, for example Tribes from the early Henrik Kniberg Spotify model, more language and terminology will be introduced in the next section

These Groups can then take on ownership of larger strategic pieces of work and deliver larger customer Objective(s), outcome(s) and experience(s), in their business Game Plan. Thes plans in turn form part of an organisational review process, such as Quarterly Business Review (QBR).

Within these groups the individual cross functional teams are still responsible for owning slices of the work they need to complete. Together all these cross functional Team deliver the Objectives which in turn achieve the Organisation Goals and fulfil the customers needs.

To ensure a Team can deliver, they are cross function with appropriate individuals from potentially any area of the organisation and bring to the team their expertise, knowledge and abilities. Individuals may also on occasions move to different teams where there may be needed to augment a solution a team is delivering.

With a more modern organisation, the traditional hierarchal management structure may still exist in the Human Resources management systems and may still exist for general reporting lines (some times called Chapters or Guilds ).

To achieve this more flexible people movement ability, line management structures that are maintained the Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) generally become aligned via skill sets of the individual commonly. These new people alignment management structures are called Chapter Areas or Skill Domains and they become the Talent Pools. Not based on the more traditional hiring manager, project or historical structure.

If there is a larger number of people (100's) within any one of these, then they can be broken down into smaller groupings of even more specific skill types and are called Chapters , or Sub Skill Domains.

This skill alignment management sturcture allows for more focused and appropriate training, resourcing, mentoring, and coaching to the specific skills of the chapter as well as a higher level cross-view of the different chapters within an Area. Using the chapter structure also provides methods for consistency of methodology, technology and tools through out the organisation.

From an Individual point of view 'Team' is the people that are worked with on a daily basis, a Group is an alignment of outcomes that a team is delivering to and a Chapter Lead is a line manager.

Once an organisation creates this type of Demand (Group / Delivery Team) and Supply (Chapter / Talent Pool) it provides transparency into human resources available to do work vs the human resource required for work than needs to be done. In turn providing insights into the work that is being proposed, what work needs to be prioritised, where skill shortfalls exist and cross training opportunities of skill, cost of work and many, many more insights.

In this introduction there has been use of lot language around structure names etcetera, in the Language section will look at some of this language and the importance of ensuring that with in an organisation everyone is using the same language to describe the same things.