Bliki: ActivityOriented

Any significant software development effort requires several different activities to
occur: analysis, user experience design, development, testing, etc. Activity-oriented
teams organize around these activities, so that you have dedicated teams for
user-experience design, development, testing etc. Activity-orientation promises many
benefits, but software development is usually better done with
OutcomeOriented teams.

Traditionally, big businesses with large IT departments (Enterprise IT) have tended
to execute IT development projects with a bunch of activity-oriented teams drawn from a
matrix IT organization (functional organization). The solid-lined arms of the
matrix (headed by a VP of development, testing and so on) are usually along activity
boundaries and they loan out “resources” to dotted-lined project or program organizations.
Common justifications for doing so include:

It helps standardization of conventions and techniques in development if all
developers report into a single organization (arm of the matrix). Same for testing
etc.

It helps the cause of mentoring, training and nurturing the competency in general
if all developers have long-lived development/engineering managers. Same for testing
etc.

It helps maximize utilization of talent (and thereby improve cost-efficiency) by
staffing projects from pools of supposedly fungible developers, testers etc.

However, activity-oriented teams are prone to optimize for their own activity and not
for the bigger picture of delivering useful software. This is a consequence of what they
are held responsible for and how they are measured. It is common for a team of only
developers to only be measured by their velocity. If they are only tasked with
delivering scope, they will not think about whether it is going to solve the problems it
was meant to. Even if they do so, they may be discouraged by the product management team
- another activity-oriented team that is only responsible determining the spec.

Organizing by activity gets in the way of lowering batch size of work that is
handed-off between teams. A separate team of testers won’t accept one story at a time
from a team of developers. They’d rather test a release worth of stories or at least all
stories in a feature at a time. This lengthens the feedback loop, increases end-to-end
cycle time and hurts overall responsiveness.

High speed IT calls for motivated teams. Autonomy is a key motivator for teams.
However, activity oriented organization can only be granted so much autonomy because
they tend to use it for optimizing their sphere of activity.

A variation of activity-oriented organization are super-specialized teams that may result
in the following ways:

Tool or skill centric teams: e.g. a WebSphere Portal Server team or a BizTalk
team

Architectural Layer teams: e.g. a presentation layer team, middleware team, data
layer team.

They are problematic because they have a narrow focus and they tend to optimize for
team performance rather than the big picture. For sure, some tools may need specialists
but that is no reason to isolate them in a separate team. Specialization isn’t the
problem; organizing along lines of specialization is.

What works better

Software development is an iterative design process. In order to achieve true
iteration and realize the value of fast feedback, its activities need to be performed
with a single team (having a common reporting line) as far as possible. Many internet
business and independent software vendors (ISVs) already operate in this way.

Sriram's book goes into more detail on how to build an effective IT organization
using agile approaches.

Activity-oriented organization may be attractive from the perspective of maximizing
utilization but it comes in the way of maximizing value-addition and end-to-end
responsiveness. In today’s business climate, market responsiveness (time-efficiency)
is more important than cost-efficiency especially when it comes to capital expenditure
items such as software development. Besides, solid-line reporting should be aligned to
the most important goals which are responsiveness and value-addition.

In order to effectively nurture competencies in the absence of an aligned reporting
structure, set up communities of practice along with expert community leads who have the
ability to mentor and the budget to organize community events, buy books and arrange for
training. These communities also help with standardizing conventions and techniques
without going overboard with standardization. As for having a stable reporting manager,
it is only an issue in project-centric IT. A Business Capability Centric setup (post
coming soon) allows
for stable reporting managers.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bill Codding, David Wang (Wang Wei), James Lewis, Kief Morris, Patrick Kua, Patrick Sarnacke, Steven Lowe and Venkatesh Ponniah for their comments. Special thanks to Martin Fowler for his guidance with the content, help with publishing and for the nice illustrations.



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