Dear all,

It’s been a VERY busy week. I am late.

We started to work with a newly cast department in the IT organisation of an international engineering corporation.

For the setup-workshop we were to develop the new organisation’s mission and its strategic objectives, plus a new team structure with the associated agile working models.

The re-organised teams would have to support the new direction. But how? Separate operations from development, slice by tech stack, or rather by supported business domains and processes?

We decided to use „outcomes“ as the driving design principle to support the strategic objectives we would arrive at.

With the organisation mainly located in recent „COVID hot-spots“, we also had to take the planned workshop online. To make collaboration in this environment more effective, we developed a series of visual workshop tools to be used with Miro.

The one of them I would like to share with you today is the „Organisation Design Tool“. Starting from the desired outcomes, it aids team design by identifying core activities, the resources consequently required (competencies and otherwise) to perform them, as well as identifying key interfaces. Goal is to create maximally self-contained, self organizing, agile team setups with as few dependencies and cross-talk as possible, to achieve outcome-orientation and delivery speed.

Here are the links to the tool and a useful video:

How to use the Organisation Design Tool

Quickly written intro into using the tool (help me improve by sending feedback – thx!):

Click to view!

Useful: a short video
from Ashridge Business School (7 mins) on organisation design principles:

Click to view!

Tool – and the rest of workshop – worked really well! We managed to develop strategic objectives, a mission statement, the new teams’ split, as well as adapted agile working models for them, plus starting backlog and OKRs for next quarter. All in a matter of three 6 hour online sessions (with ample breaks!). Kudos to all workshop participants!

Btw: If you have comments or ideas for further improvement of the Organisation Design Tool, we do consider it a beta and would love to hear from you!

I definitively need my weekend break now…

Have a great weekend,
Godehard