How to Facilitate an Outstanding Sprint Review in “Bazaar Mode”
Review Bazaar is one of the Elevating Structures that help to uplift your ecosystem up the levels of the Org Topologies™ mapping: This...
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Assess, prepare and adopt
Adaptive Org Design
"Do we need another reorganization to stay relevant for our customers?"
Paula, the Head of Product, believes her mission is to build a great product organization that is capable of driving the business impact.
The efforts in the recent organizational change initiatives paved the way to become more resilient in the ever-changing business landscape. However, Paula has realized that her organization has spent a tremendous amount of effort to sustain its performance, and it will struggle to live up to the constant flow of unforeseen challenges.
Her recent insights: there must be a better way to get the organization in shape to keep delivering on the strategic initiatives without the need for constant reorganizations.
But how to balance sustaining the current performance of teams with the constant need for change?
Paula, Head of Product
Introduction to Elevating Structures™
The Org Topologies™ model supports people to address organizational transformation systemically. We provide a mapping technique to visualize the product development ecosystem. The mapping establishes a framework-agnostic language that describes organizational design transparently. They serve to create better (digital) product development organizations.
We are biased towards long-living teams as a core building block for organizational design, and towards high adaptability as a perfection goal. This gives a long-term vector for change that will make businesses more valuable, humane, and relevant for their customers in the long run.
Elevating Structures™, are a rich set of materials (i.e. tools, templates, workshops, articles, etc.) we add to our model to get everybody started experiencing and experimenting with the practices of the higher archetypes.
Elevating Structures™
Practices and tools that stimulate organizational design to move toward higher-level archetypes as per Org Topologies™ Mapping.
Elevating Structures™ is a rich set of practices and tools that we recommend to use on your journey towards high adaptability (a.k.a. business agility).
The practices are systemic, which means they reduce local optimization and help the organization to move toward global optimization.
Organizations that elevate their value-creating ecosystems follow these guiding principles:
1. From managing dependencies to collaborative value creation
2. From fast flow at the team level to being efficient globally
3. From reducing the cognitive load to expanding on human potential
4. From constant reorganization to adaptive org design
5. From 'divide and conquer' to managing the whole
Elevated Ecosystems in Software Development (Business-Oriented R&D)
In many digital product development organizations, Business and IT (which we prefer to call R&D) are separate organizational units. The business is typically seen as a profit center and R&D as a cost center. To obtain company-level R&D efficiency for delivering value, we need both, so it makes sense to merge them. The million-dollar question is: "How?"
In traditional digital product development, work is broken down into items with a narrow scope so that they can be dispatched to people with deep specialist skills. Optimization efforts are focused on improving efficiency to obtain optimal flow. On the other hand, people who work in a broader area of the business domain are more flexible to adapt to changing demands.
Creating a business-oriented R&D means finding the sweet spot where the worlds of fast flow and global optimization intersect.
Industry Examples of Business-Oriented R&D
Creating a business-oriented R&D group means we implement multi-skilled groups of teams, where value is created seamlessly by product-, and technical experts who work as one. This kind of organizational design is not established overnight. It is a long-term vector for organizational change because of its impact on many aspects of the organization (budgeting, HR, governance, culture, etc).
The following companies have succeeded in creating such organizational designs.
Case studies and experience reports are valuable resources for learning. The authors of these articles describe their observations, studies, and experiments using Org Topologies™.
These real-life examples will not only help you apply the model in your daily practice, but they will also give you valuable insights into how organizations gradually transformed and created their business-oriented R&D.
The Future is with Adaptive Learning & GenAI
The future is now. Learn how new technology will impact our organizational design.
Towards a Collection of Elevating Structures
primer
Download the Org Topologies™ Primer
The Primer is a free, comprehensive summary of the Org Topologies™ visual thinking tool to help you assess and design your agile ecosystem and its change over time.
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