Organizational Realignment

[drgroove]

I'm working on a multi-year project for a state government agency, providing ITIL process design and organizational realignment.

Regarding the organizational realignment effort, I was wondering if there are any industry best-practice recommendations for this.

For example, my client's application development organization is comprised largely of Developers, with no real designation for the roles of Business Analyst, Quality Assurance / Control / Testing, Architect, Project Manager, DBA, Source Code Managers, etc.

This same flat-organizational paradigm is also resident in Network, Server, Mainframe, etc.

Is there a standard available for assessing an organization through an interview process, and providing diversification recommendations based on employee interview profiles?

I can invent all of this on the fly, I suppose, but it would be more time consuming. That, and given that the client has bought into the ITIL process methodology, leveraging an existing organizational realignment framework would have more credibility than offering something that I've personally invented.

Hope all this makes sense; thanks in advance for your help.

- DrGroove
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DrGroove
ITIL Architect | Moderator, Devshed.com | Technology journalist

[Diarmid]

It is not necessarily good to align organizational structure to ITIL. In fact it could become a straight-jacket.

Also I cannot imagine an abstracted organizational structure that could be applied to an organization irrespective of what its range of activities is, of how large it is, of how complex it is, of how stable/volatile its business and technology environments are.

Let me give you an over-simplified fragment of an example:

You have a sufficiently large organization to justify a dozen or more Unix specialists and a dozen or more Mainframe O/S specialists.
Do you have a Second-line Support Manager with two teams of, say, ten staff and a Capacity Manager with two teams of two staff?
OR
Do you have a Unix manager with staff dedicated to the different roles, and Mainframe Manager with staff dedicated to the different roles?
OR
Do you have Unix and Mainframe Manager with staff mixing between roles according to need?
OR
Do you have a System A Manager with a small set of technical staff and System B Manager with a small set of technical staff and System C Manager with a small set of technical staff?
OR
Something else entirely?

Someone may be able to point you to techniques and frameworks for assessment (such as SFIA in the UK), but I don't think there are many shortcuts to the design of a viable organization structure. Lines of communication, responsibility, etc. are important for all functions and so RACI will be one of your tools for validating your structure.
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"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[Diarmid]

Sorry, I forgot to say that USMBOK should be very useful also.
_________________
"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[drgroove]

Diarmid,

Thanks for the response.

Actually, I wasn't planning on guiding the organization towards an ITIL organizational model, but appreciate your concerns and have much the same thoughts.

I'll review the online documentation for USMBOK, thanks so much for the recommendation.

Basically, I've done a ton of ITIL, SDLC and ITAM process assessments and process re-design throughout my career. I've done a few small-scale organizational assessments and re-orgs, but to date have only re-org'd small divisions (> ~30). Currently I'm consulting with a CIO for a division within the State, and need to evaulate and re-org their software development group, which is about 130 people. Rather than lean on solely my own experience, I'd prefer to leverage some sort of standardized methodology for this re-org exercise, in the same manner that I prefer to lean on ITIL or various SDLC methodologies when re-designing IT processes.

Hope that makes sense... and hopefully USMBOK points me in the right direction. Thanks again dude.
_________________
DrGroove
ITIL Architect | Moderator, Devshed.com | Technology journalist