Organization by activity

This type of organization structure focuses on the fact that similar activities have to be performed on all technologies in the organization. This means that people who perform similar activities, regardless of the technology, should be grouped together, although within each department there may be teams focusing on a specific technology, application, etc.

In this type of organization, there is no clear differentiation between the different Technical and Application Management areas. Similar activities from many different areas can be grouped into a single department.

Examples of departments that have been set up to perform a specific set of activities across multiple technologies include:

• Maintenance (this implies that one team will coordinate and perform all maintenance across all technologies)
• Contract Management or Third Party Management
• Monitoring and Control
• Operations Bridge
• Network Operations Centre
• Operations Strategy and Planning (which, as part of the Service Design processes, normally defines the standards to be used in IT Operations) – this department can set strategy or standards for every type of Technical and Application Management area.

The Operations Strategy and Planning department is used to illustrate this type of structure in Figure 6.8.

Figure 6.8 A department based on executing a set of activities

The advantages of this type of organizational structure include the following.

• It is easier to manage groups of related activities since all the people involved in these activities report to the same manager
• Measurement of teams or departments is based more on output than on isolated activities. This helps to build higher levels of assurance that a service can be delivered.

The disadvantages of this type of organizational structure include the following.

• Resources with similar skills may be duplicated across different functions, which results in higher costs
• Although measurement is more output-based, it is still focused on the performance of internal activities rather than driven by the experience of the customer or end user.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1292