Create alignment between your org chart and cross-functional teamwork
A client of mine is currently restructuring nearly everything about their organization: what work they do, how they go about it, and who is responsible for what. It’s a big undertaking, but their visions of impact are even bigger. They have an ambitious vision map and aspire to cultivate a healthier culture. But first, we have some housekeeping to do. Here’s where we are starting.
STEP 1Define the org chart
The first step toward clarity and shared purpose across the organization is to publish the org chart. It’s seems too obvious to need work, but that’s the problem with “obvious.” To paraphrase Dave Gray in his book Liminal Thinking, obvious is the sliver of information you focus your attention based on your experience and your knowledge. Not everyone has the same knowledge, experience, and certainly isn’t focusing on the narrow band of data that you are.
More than just creating a diagram of who reports to whom, we are taking the time to describe WHY the departments exist. What is the core purpose of each department? Who do they serve—is it primarily customers, internal teams, or a mix of both?
Without documentation that is regularly updated and visible to everyone in the organization, employees are left on their own to make up their own definitions. This inevitably leads to conflict and misaligned efforts.
STEP 2Define Objectives and Key Results for the organization
To achieve maximum impact through our efforts, we’ll next define objectives for the organization. An objective is measured by the key result delivered through project work. Read more in the book Measuring What Matters by John Doerr.
Since we’re just getting started using objectives and key results, we start smaller than we think we should. Trying to map out the entire system for every person in the organization will create a bog of details before the structure is in place. So we start by defining our top objective for the coming year. That’s objective, single. Within this objective we’ll identify multiple key results, all of which will be pulling toward a shared outcome. When we’ve gone through this process at least once, we can start adding layers of OKRs and objectives, gradually spreading across the organization.
Key results are best when they include: (1) quantitative measures, (2) qualitative measures, and (3) a timeline.
STEP 3Define a Project Charter
The key results we’ve identified become projects. The key result is already pointed to a clear objective, which outlines the importance to the organization. The key result also has a timeline attached to it. What’s next is to lay out the roles and expectations for people working on this project.
I’ve been on so many projects where the assignment was clear and my colleagues and I were ready to go, but we didn’t know who was expected to do what. Drafting a project charter before starting the work will make those roles and responsibilities clear to everyone involved. It will cut back on meetings full of wasted time where people argue about where to start. Or where people who have been asked to participate don’t know what’s expected of them. And of course, the situation where people want to keep tabs on what’s happening, but don’t need to sit through more meetings.
In the past, I’ve seen well-intentioned teams use the RACI Matrix, but with limited effect. The problem was the unclear language of Responsible-Accountable-Consulted-Informed. What’s really the difference between Responsible and Accountable? The DACI Matrix seems more clear to teams I’ve worked with recently. It stands for Driver-Approver-Consulted-Informed. But that didn’t quite get there, either.
So I adapted it to be DASCI. It stands for:
Driver. The project driver is the steward of the project. She guides the team in framing problems, exploring options, and making decisions. She ensures stakeholders are aware of what’s happening and that project work aligns with the key result it is mapped to. Each project should have only one driver, to avoid people pointing fingers at each other. However, the driver is not a tyrant. She coordinates the work and likely has an active hand in it, but doesn’t overly influence decisions.
Approver. The approver is the one who has final say in decisions and designating the project as complete. This is typically someone in management or leadership, and probably isn’t involved with the day-to-day work. When deciding on an approver(s) for the project, it’s a good time to also consider decision-making moments, criteria and thresholds. For example, identify which decisions need to be made by the approver(s) and which can be made by the team. For decisions made by the team (or multiple approvers), use a tool such as the Gradients of Agreement to gauge team opinions. Finally, set a threshold for a minimum value across the team.
For example, at least 80% of the team should score 4 or higher on the Gradients of Agreement in order to proceed.
Subject Matter Experts. These are the people who have knowledge and expertise we want to consider, but who won’t be part of the day-to-day project work. This could be a team leader responsible for providing accessibility services to guests and customers, or a Marketing manager who maintains the email campaign platform, as two examples. This is a great opportunity to use a Stakeholder Map to consider both who has expert knowledge related to the work, and who will be affected by the results of the project work. For a project to improve the employee onboarding experience, for example, we might consider talking with a recently-hired employee, who will be the expert in what that experience feels like to a new person. Subject Matter Experts will be engaged through information-gathering and review sessions when proposed solutions are ready for feedback.
Contributors. Contributors make up the bulk of the team. They’re the ones doing the hands-on work. They need us to be clear on how much of their time will be devoted to this effort. If they have job roles that cover multiple domains, we’ll specify which we’re expecting them to use for this project. For example, if a team member is a training coordinator and content creator, w’ell specify which hat we’re expecting her to wear on this team.
Informed. Lastly, we’ll make it easy for everyone who needs and wants to follow the progress to do so. Using the Stakeholder Map, we’ll make sure that people who will be impacted by the project and decisions know what’s happening BEFORE it upsets the apple cart. For everyone else, we’ll publish progress on a shared platform like Asana or Confluence and allow people to opt-in and follow if they want to.
STEP 4Map employees to the project charter
By this point we’ll have probably already started writing in specific names to form the project team as we think through the project charter. This is where the magic happens, where the vertical org chart and horizontal project team intersect.
Looking back through the org chart and we’ll consider whether all the work areas that need to have a voice are represented in the project charter. But this not about saddling employees with more work just to add names and departments to the project. It’s about ensuring that people aren’t surprised by work they should’ve had a say in. It’s also about reducing redundancy across the organization.
Another thing we’ll check for is employee assignments across projects. Some employees—due to their position and/or their expertise—will naturally find themselves contributing to more projects than others. We’ll take a moment to consider whether they need to be contributors to every project, or if they could be more effective as subject matter experts or even approvers.
Conclusion: vertical and horizontal leads to better work
Vertical alignments for reporting structures and domain expertise are important. Employees need to know who will remove obstacles, provide guidance, and go to bat for them. It’s also beneficial for people to spend time with other people working in their domain to share knowledge and practices.
Horizontal project assignments can bring organizational objectives to life and improve overall efficiency through clear project assignments and OKRs.