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Can YOU Tear Down Walls Between Departments?

9/4/2013

2 Comments

 
Picture
One BIG source of process delays, defects and variations that I always see are walls between departments.  This is no surprise since companies usually set-up their structures according to functional activities:  Sales, Marketing, Operations, Logistics, Accounting, HR, etc.  This tried and tested way of organizing people are not really wrong.  It makes planning, organizing, leading, and controlling employees more efficient because each employee that performs the same function works as a team and reports to the same manager. 

The problem lies when we start talking in terms of process.  Processes  produce the products and services that the company sells to its customers, and processes, are almost always, cross-functional.  Meaning, for every process, it involves at least 2 departments, and the outputs of one department are inputs of another.  Since departments work in silos, they usually have conflicting agendas. 

Every department has its own set of targets, metrics, goals, and sad to say, personal interests.  I have seen it with my own eyes: 
  • Sales prioritizing volume while downplaying unnecessary quality;
  • Marketing prioritizing speed while downplaying expenses; 
  • Logistics prioritizing efficiency while downplaying the need to have allowances in stocks;
  • Operations prioritizing speed to satisfy orders in time while downplaying defects and rework resulting to hidden costs;
  • Audit insisting all thousand transactions of a process conform to a control designed to avoid a repeat of an error happened only once, due to a special cause, resulting to delays.

And the list goes on and on.

One school of thought is to cure this conflicting agendas is to structure an organization according to "process" and not "functions".  Advocates of this idea say that this strategy shall make all departments that form a process look to a common goal and tear down silo mentality.


Your thoughts please?  Everyone is listening.


2 Comments
Jun
9/4/2013 01:41:51 pm

The functional design enables people to develop expertise in their own line of work. I guess the concept is that the overall result should improve with greater expertise or depth. A problem arises when the mind frame is only focused on this when, in fact, greater expertise can also be gained through development of depth and breadth of capability. To develop breadth, one must understand how one's own area is related to the others: learning how to adjust to the lowered performance of the previous while maintaining the same level of performance so as not to disrupt the next. Understanding how one's own performance affects the performance of the whole organization should, therefore, be the mindset of everyone. I have always used this concept in developing the competencies of people: developing depth and breadth so that each individual is no longer an island but part of the whole, each string playing its individual note but blending with the others to create one whole melody which is the organizational goal.

Reply
Rex Jayson
9/5/2013 01:33:54 am

Nothing more to say Jun. This concept is the core value of the Lean Six Sigma discipline:

"each string playing its individual note but blending with the others to create one whole melody which is the organizational goal."


Thank you for sharing.

Reply



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    Rex Jayson Tuozo "The Six Sigma Guy"

    Rex is a Six Sigma Trainer and Consultant, theater performer, Suits & Game of Thrones fan, and the author of the 1st Six Sigma book in the Philippines

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