Organisation structure: Matrix Organisation harms your company
Organisation structure is something extremely important for the success of the company. In this blog post I will explore how an organisation structure built in a matrix organisation can harm your company. Before I continue I want to refer there are some companies that are able to apply this organisation structure with success, like for example Spotify.
Spotify document about tribes and guilds became extremely popular (you can download it here) in the Agile community. If you take a look into their organisation structure they are using a matrix organisation but in my opinion this is not the best approach. I still believe they were not able to get rid of it because of political and human reasons but that would be another story.
Before I continue I would like to explain what is an organisation structure based in a matrix organisation, just to make sure that you fully understand what I want to say. In a simple away a matrix organisation is an organisation where vertical projects are staffed with several individuals from different parts of the company belonging to several different departments. This approach is extremely common nowadays where companies start to implement Agile.
Agile asks for cross functional teams therefore companies start to build teams around different people with different skills in the organisation. At first glance this is something quite nice but as I will explain later on, the promised effect is not that great. Below you can find a picture that represents an organisation structure with a form of Matrix.
As you can see companies have several products/projects in parallel and different people from different departments are brought together to build a cross functional team. Like I referred before Agile asks for this kind of setup, so where is the problem?
During some years I have been working in companies where this organisation structure is present so below I am presenting the most common problems that arise.
Extremely Political Environment
It is not uncommon that organisations with this kind of setup suffer of political issues. In reality the team is a bunch of individuals from different parts of the organisations that are brought together to deliver something. My experience tells me the problem is not with team members but with line managers. If everything is going well line managers tend to say the success is result of their team members.
If something really bad happens, line managers tend to say the problems relies on the other departments. They enter into the “save my ass” mode, trying to cover their ass instead of helping the organisation to find the problem.
Blame Culture
I believe this is a bit the result of the previous problem. When something goes wrong people within different departments try to save their ass and basically blame everyone else than themselves. Unfortunately I see this happens too often.
Horizontal Line interference
In my career I see this happening almost in any company where I work. Moving towards Agile is something difficult for most of the middle managers. There are clear roles for Product Owners, Scrum Masters and Team Members but nothing for Agile Managers. In a previous blog I tried to explain the role of an Agile Manager but still, I believe this is something quite difficult for most of the people.
Managers try to do their best to help people but in my humble opinion most of the time this causes more harm than good. They try to have 1:1 to help people with career development, they try to have team events, they try to have many other things but in reality all these activities are defocusing people from their product team.
Another typical example is to have all these line managers in all meetings, like for example, dailies, planning’s, reviews, etc. etc. Because they want to see what their guys are doing they go to these meetings but unfortunately most of them cannot keep their mouth shut, therefore they end up sabotaging and making all these meetings quite inefficient.
Decisions take a lot of time to be made
Of course in theory team should own all their decisions, but with so many chefs in the kitchen I can guarantee that any decision that could take just few minutes with this kind of organisation structure will turn into a negotiation for weeks. Not productive at all.
Individual Goals mess
People that follow my work knows how I love personal Goals, specially the ones attached to Individual Performance. In this organisation structure we have the right setup to launch the company to chaos and drain people´s motivation.
Let me explain, having several horizontal line managers implies (in most of the organisations) that each different person will have a different goal or goals defined by his/her manager.
Now if you think that in a team of 7 everyone has 2 goals this means that we have a total of 14 individual goals that have nothing to do with the team goal, which actually is the most important one.
Of course you can say the team as a whole will have their own goal, and all the individual goals would be align with the team goal, but do you really believe that with so many different managers, different people and different goals, people will be align with Team goals? Good luck on that ;). If you want to know more about how personal individual goals destroy companies take a look into my previous blog posts:
Rewards may destroy improvement efforts in our companies
Goals and Objectives attached to monetary rewards destroy your MVP!!!
Rewards are a great way to Punish people
Employee reward discourage risk-taking
SMART objectives are DUMB objectives!!!
Interference with new hirings
Several years ago I had the opportunity to be part of a sad story. At that time I was Scrum Master and the team was recruiting a developer. Of course we all looked for senior developers. We had several interviews with several candidates but only one guy seemed to be a perfect fit for our team. We all agreed he was our man. We communicated with everyone and said he should be hired.
Couple of days later, the head of software development informed us that HE had chosen another guy. So basically a guy that is was not part of the team, that would not work on a daily basis with the new developer, that he did not have a clue about what we needed decided the future of the whole team. Later on we found out that he was simply trying to achieve his personal yearly goal (saving money for the department).
Our companies are full of these cases, this is another typical case how horizontal line manages without understanding their place in Agile Organisations can actually harm quite a lot the company.
On my next blog I will explain how you should build a team in order to avoid all these problems.
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Cheers,
Luis
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