Take for example a new company I provided some initial training and coaching for… They were relatively small with four teams:
- Search
- Reporting
- Front End
- Other
Seams harmless. However, their product managers (soon to become product owners) were responsible for only two functions (simplified):
- supply-side – those that produced content for their business
- demand-side – those that consumed content from their business
Thus, their product managers were coordinating across four teams to get their work done. Teams had a number of dependencies they needed to manage. This all required project management to coordinate all of the interrelated communication lines.
My recommendation was simple – create supply-side and demand-side teams, align them with the product owners and give them responsibility over the pipeline. Well, after much skepticism, vocal “buts”, and much discussion, the organization has decided to restructure around this premise. Many of the “buts” are real and will require some changes to the way people work on a team and the technology they work on at times. This is not easy to do, but once teams make this transition – it is amazing to see the teamwork evolve!
Now, this is a relatively simple example, but serves to underscore the fundamental problem – and that problem gets worse the larger the organization is. Yet, it is this very same change that has made larger case studies like Salesforce.com, JDA Software and others successful.