7 great ways to Perform Organizational Design in Large Scale Scrum

All right, your strategy to scale productivity in your team has been great. But, when you realized that something is still missing, what could it be?

Perhaps your organization is not designed the way your team understands every task they need to deliver, because they find it very confused.

Today’s world is made up of a constant transformation. The general environment among organizations is changing and it is dynamic. Therefore, it requires wide adaptability as a basic survival requirement.

Design Organizational is a response to change — it is a tool used in the process of designing, defining, and adjusting structures to ensure that organizations’ goals are met.

It is important to remember that this strategy will be worthless if it is not widely disseminated and communicated to all members of the organization who are involved in this process.

Only in this way will it serve as a guide for the transition and the necessary adaptations.

In this post, you will understand what is Design Organizational and how it can match with Large Scale.

What is Organizational Design?

Organizational design management is a new concept that allows us to revisit the organization’s structure and how its current design enables the internal flows of communication, resources, and processes, thus structuring work teams.

It seeks optimization in production processes to improve quality and agility in organizational performance logistics, aiming at the quick response in decision-making. Design Organizational brings several advantages to your business and implements differentiated processes aligned with your goals.

The organizational design is responsible for this change, it analyzes the project that will be carried out and indicates the most effective process to be implemented in employee development. In addition, it measures the result of the investment in training and development made in the professionals on its team.

Importance of this Design

It is important to emphasize that when we talk about processes, we are thinking about how they occur in the company’s day-to-day activities. This context encompasses communication and decision-making flows, as well as the grouping of employees within the company.

Moreover, the idea is to relate the strategy to the structure to achieve the goals and generate value for the enterprise and the employees. In other words, the benefits of organizational design go far beyond and reach results, internal hierarchy, decision making, and even people management.

Yet, Design Organizational arises from the need to revisit and rethink the organization of companies today. It is the result of an awakening that questions the decision model that the company experiences as a result of its cultural traits.

This means that the employee participates in a company that leaves their schedule boxes well defined. This structure has changed over time and has become different, allowing people to participate and collaborate more towards organizational goals.

Thus, the benefits of this procedure increase organizational effectiveness, improve the company’s image, reduce staff turnover, expand employee skills, increase profit, reduce costs, etc.

Benefits of Design Organizational

A relevant issue that needs to be highlighted is that organizational design does not have an ideal model, a magic formula that can be applied to all companies. Ideally, build on in-depth analysis and discussions to conclude which tactic will work best for your business.

However, this is not to say that there are no benefits to adopting this concept in your company. Several advantages can be noted, such as:

Aligning the business model to your goal


This is one of the main advantages, because this way, it is possible to reassess the processes and implement a model that facilitates the achievement of objectives. It happens due to a cultural change, which brings agility to decision-making.

Organizational design knows that companies are born with purposes, objectives, and goals to be achieved. Therefore, it understands and uses motivational and training tools within the organization to qualify the company’s growth and emergence.

One of the organization’s goals is to review the processes and implement a standard that meets the desired changes. This happens when a cultural change takes place in the organization’s environment — precisely facilitating decisions.

Breaking barriers between departments


The organizational design makes companies look to see if the current business model meets the business objectives. However, the world is constantly changing, which requires a frequent review of processes.

This situation requires breaking down barriers between departments to bring more agility to operations. This ensures an improvement in information and procedural flows, which leads to the delivery of results in line with the current moment.

In addition, breaking down barriers increases the likelihood of collaboration among team members. This is because the hierarchy is more flexible and people become cooperation-oriented.

Offering effective solutions to solve problems

Companies are promoting changes with great speed in their organizational structures, aiming at market competitiveness.

For this reason, institutions are seeking guidance from organizational design, so that new methods of training, qualification, and development of their professionals are implemented.

With this, organizations move away from a traditional view and start to adopt structures based on teams formed by employees with different functions and positions — improving the interaction between the group and generating effective advantages.

Speeding up response time and decision-making


The hierarchical flexibility provided by organizational design increases the speed of response and decision-making.

We can take the example of a company that has 10 hierarchical layers. In this type of company, it would be more complicated to make decisions quickly, considering all the steps that the decision needs to go through.

Observing the organizational design, it is possible to make the hierarchy more flexible, which improves the structure and, consequently, the decision-making process.

Focusing more attention on people

The organizational designer is the professional in the human resources area who works with a differentiated look and seeks to understand people’s behavior, this is their main challenge.

It encourages employees and simultaneously adjusts the company’s strategic requirements to organizational practices and structures. Keeps employees in tune with the organization’s purposes and objectives.

This is one of the most important phases of this process: making the company consider the professionals of your institution. Not every manager can understand that by training and developing their employees, positive results will be generated for the company.

7 principles of Design Organizational in Scrum at Scale

According to less. works, 7 principles lead Design Organizational in Large at Scale Scrum.

1. From Specialist Roles to Teams

LeSS organizations have teams that have a shared responsibility for achieving a customer-centric goal, by self-managing.

People naturally have preferences and don’t limit to a single specialization. Many specialist roles, such as tester or interaction designer, or business analyst, cease to exist as these responsibilities become team responsibilities.

2. From Resource-Thinking to People-Thinking

LeSS organizations manage people as people and assume that the greatest skills of individuals are acquiring and developing skills.

LeSS organizations are structured to purposely cause a mismatch between existing skills and knowledge and those needed, for the benefit of increasing adaptiveness.

3. From Organizing around Technology to Organizing around Customer Value

LeSS organizations structure their organizations around customer value. Bringing teams close to customers by organizing them around customer value increases this understanding and leads to greater adaptiveness and more customer value.

4. From Independent Teams to Continuous Cross-team Cooperation

LeSS organizations prefer multiple teams with shared work. They continuously cooperate to contribute to one consistent product. They work like one larger team, even though each team has its goal and own identity. Change, review, and approval can be greatly simplified or even disappear.

5. From Coordinate to Integrate to Coordination through Integration

LeSS organizations have teams that continuously integrate their work. Through continuous integration, the teams discover opportunities for cross-team collaboration—a surprising and powerful idea.

Because of the synchronous nature of cross-team integration. The teams have shared work right now at the same time. The coordination responsibility integrates into the team. External-to-team coordination roles disappear.

6. From Projects to Products

LeSS organizations manage development as products. Products have a clear purpose but no fixed end or scope. People allocate to them for an undetermined amount of time.

It develops a continuously product and therefore a regular rhythm of re-allocating the people to products will suffice. Complicated project portfolio management disappears.

7. From Many Small Products to a Few Broad Products

LeSS organizations prefer managing broad customer-centric products. The services, components, applications, and platforms belong to one product with one Product Backlog and one Product Owner.

Teams create customer-centric features and work across these components. Complicated portfolio management disappears, and complicated cross-product management structures disappear or become significantly simpler.

With Design Organizational, managers from different areas gain an ally in the task of organizing production activities in the best possible way.

The methodology can use planning to build and optimize processes to talk to what the brand represents and also contribute to the challenges of daily work.

With optimized flows, the company can only gain from greater productivity and happier employees.

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