Organizational Structures

Driving results through social cohesion instead of individual contribution.

Organizations (and individuals) often place value on star employees who outperform others. On this insightful TED Talk, Margaret Heffernan illustrates that grouping high-performing individuals does not lead to greater productivity, and in fact goes against it. She reasons that it is social cohesion - built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help - that leads over time to great results.

Experiences in implementing the squad-based model when growing from 100 to 250 employees.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Leboncoin Julien Jouhault shares his company's own experience implementing Spotify's framework and how they finally got it to work for them. He confirms that they implemented the model all the while growing from 100 to over 250 engineers, 35 squads, and 4 tribes. Their approach was under a matrix-based management model that they later coupled with their own Travail d'Organization Ouvert model (TOO) and services architecture, and DevOps principles creating an organization that identifies problems on its own and solves them with the support of management.

Scrum doesn’t know a role called “Project Manager”.

Scrum is a framework, consisting of 3 roles, 3 artifacts and 5 events. It is meant to be used in many different environments, some with Project Manager functions and others without. Willem-Jan Ageling explains that due to Scums' focus on products instead of projects, the PM function is vanishing. But by understanding its value, there are still specific situations where a Project Manager may and should be required.

ITIL is a framework of best practices for delivering IT services.

ITIL’s systematic approach to IT service management can help businesses manage risk, strengthen customer relations, establish cost-effective practices, and build a stable IT environment that allows for growth, scale and change. In this article the authors explain what it is, what it entails, and how to put it into practice. It is a very high-level overview, but it will get you started by setting general expectations.

Two senior executives from the global bank describe their recent journey.

In 2015, the Dutch banking group ING shifted from the traditional organizational structure to an Agile model intrigued by major conglomerates such as Google and Netflix. Two senior executives from the financial entity explain the transformation journey in an interview answering questions like, why the bank needed to change, how it manages without the old reporting lines, and how it measures the impact of its efforts.

Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.

Jeremiah Lee briefly tells his story of how he was excited to join the Spotify HQ in Stockholm in 2017 and see the Spotify squad model in action as a product manager - only later to learn that the famed squad model was only ever aspirational and never fully implemented, as it failed to work for the company. He witnessed the company leaders incrementally transition to more traditional management structures. So what is really the Spotify squad model and why didn't it work? let's find out in the article.

All organisations, from the largest enterprise to the newest startup, face the same challenge: how to solve their users’ problems by bringing a superior product (or service) to market faster than their competitors.

Naresh Jain takes us through a journey of how an organization leveraged its millions of diverse users to propel a cultural enterprise transformation. Struggling to build novel products, find the right user needs to focus on, and how to rapidly innovate, he shares the five key elements of their approach. With clarity and transparency, we are taken step-by-step through years of learnings.

Defining the role of the Project Management Office in an agile organization

What exactly is the "PMO Office", and what value does it provide? Ian Mitchell argues the need for critical oversight and governance as organizations grow, as well as the reduction of risk in a portfolio of corporate projects. He also acknowledges that often PMO Offices turn into the process police, identifies how to measure the health of the system and the path towards true business agility.