Size Does Matter After All
Friday, May 14, 2010 at 8:35PM Today I read a great article by Martin Atherton, who suggested that following a formal quality methodology such as ITIL (or Six Sigma or TQM or CMMI) might not generate ROI for mid-to-small organizations, having less than 200 people. And I have to say, having started my career in 2 giant organizations (Accenture and AT&T), where process was king or at least queen, and now at a startup (well it was a startup when I started, anyway), I at least partially agree. My current company has 60 people, we don't have a lot of extra resources, and when it comes right down to it, we have to get stuff done.
So we use some light process, and we improvise. I'm a big fan of what my wife calls 'right-sized' processes in all parts of an organization, not just IT. Having the right amount of process/methodology in an area can help us to achieve a consistent result with different players without slowing things down too much. Why is it so often that the organzations we work in tend to the extremes, too much or too little process? Maybe because it's right-sized when it starts out, but fails to evolve with the organization. Or maybe because, to the people creating the process (employees or consultants), all they have is a hammer and everything starts to look like a nail (thanks Mike, ps-it's less fun being the wood than the hammer), and they start to get crazy with over-process-izing everything. Maybe because it's emotionally easier to do process work than to address human performance issues (Jim Collins says above all else get the right people on the bus, and while that can be less than fun to do I can't agree more how important it is). Not sure.
Of course smaller organizations have benefits as well, such as shortened lines of communication, fewer people to educate, and fairly homogenous products to work on, which makes it easier to achieve focus. I think that's why some companies keep subdividing (e.g. Microsoft, which is really a large number of related work units under a giant umbrella), to stay focused and efficient. Might be sort of a corollary to Dunbar's number.
Anywho Martin, I think you're right - one size does not fit all. You have to pick and choose the recipes that will work best for you and your organization, and only cook up enough for the people you're inviting to dinner.
Reader Comments (1)
Good points. I'm a fan of spinning up a process or applying a framework in any size of organization. For example, if you feel a service catalog, service desk, portal, metrics, etc. are right for your team, don't wait for a central group to provide a framework to align the rest of the business. If you start small and get a visible win, others will follow or accelerate their efforts.That's a good time for coordination and hopefully they'll build off your precedent.
However I'm a classic trouble maker who's ready to improve first and ask questions later :-)