Organizing to manage processes

It is not a good idea to structure the whole organization according to processes. Processes are used to overcome the ‘silo effect’ of departments, not to create silos. However, there are a number of processes that will need a dedicated organization structure to support and manage it. For example, it will be very difficult for Financial Management to be successful without a dedicated Finance department – even if that department consists of a small number of staff.

In process-based organizations people are organized into groups or departments that perform or manage a specific process. This is similar to the activity-based structure, except that its departments focus on end-to-end sets of activities rather than on one individual type of activity.

It should be noted that this type of organization structure should only be used if IT Operations Management is responsible for more than just IT Operations. In some organizations, for example, IT Operations is responsible for defining SLAs and negotiating UCs.

In addition, processes specifically exist to link the activities of different groups to achieve a specific outcome. Using processes as the basis to create departments can defeat the purpose of having processes in the first place. Process-based departments are really only effective when they are able to coordinate the execution of the process through the entire organization.

This means that process-based departments should only be considered if IT Operations Management is to play the role of Process Owner for a specific process.

Examples of process-based groups or departments include:

• Capacity Operations
• Availability Monitoring and Control
• IT Financial Management
• Security Administration
• Asset and Configuration Management (including equipment installation and deployment).

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

• Processes are easier to define
• There is less role conflict as job descriptions and process role descriptions are the same. In other structures a single job description will typically include activities for several roles
• Metrics of team or department performance and process performance are the same, effectively aligning ‘internal’ and ‘external’ metrics.

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

• A basic principle of processes is that they are a means of linking the activities of various departments and groups. By using processes as a basis for organizational design, additional processes need to be defined to ensure that the departments work together.
• Even if a department is responsible for executing a process, there will still be external dependencies. Groups may not view process activities outside of their own process as being important, resulting in processes that cannot be fully executed because dependencies cannot be met.
• While some aspects of a process can be centralized, there will always be a number of activities that will have to be performed by other groups. The relationship between the dedicated team or department and the people performing the decentralized activities is often difficult to define and manage.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 897