The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Create an Effective Team Organizational Structure | PPP#83

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Whether functional, geographic based or a combination of both, pulling together a working organizational structure is key to meet program objectives and ensure alignment with leader's intent.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the People Process Progress podcast, episode 83, Foundation 3, Create an Org Structure. Congratulations to you for sticking with this five-part series on the foundational five. And again, those foundational five things that I think can help any team, leader, group kind of get squared away in the spur of the moment or for a prolonged thing is to understand our leader's intent, which we talked about in episode 81, to pull together some smart objectives, which we talked about in the last episode, episode 82. Today, we'll talk about creating an org structure. And in the following couple episodes, we'll talk about foundation four, which is to request and coordinate resources effectively. And the fifth rather is communicate, communicate, communicate. So thank you so much.

And let's set those ground rules. Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with people process progress in three, two, one. Now that our phones are silent, we are focused on the topic at hand. Let's talk about team organization, which is foundation three of those foundational five things. Organizations vary, right, as much as the people in them do. But there are some standards that I've found that I've learned, or guardrails that we can use to help kind of optimize how we put those boxes and lines together to create an organizational chart, a team, an org, whatever you want to call it, but a group of people that work together to meet those objectives and fall within that leaders intent. So for me a lot of

my early experience in organization or exposure to organizations came from sports, right? Playing team sports, growing up young, playing soccer, football, and played basketball just a little bit. And then the military, of course, very much about organization and structure and chain of command, those kind of things, which we'll get into a little bit. And then all hazards incident management or special event planning or a combination of those. And that is kind of typically public safety, public works, public health folks that plan and support special events, responses, big area searches, collapse things, a whole bunch of stuff. So there are some standards and some guardrails that we can learn that help us learn the nuance

of creating an organization, which we'll kind of talk through. Because yes, while there's some standard terms and some things we can do, there's also a lot of that, you know, less science, more nuance, kind of learning the best way to pull people together. So let's talk about that, how it's applicable to incident management teams, project teams, and even family life kind of. And so I'm just going to start with some of the big, and again, I'm going with kind of American sports, although we'll touch on some of the other ones, football. So in team sports like football, American football, there is a leader typically or a

decision maker, and that's oftentimes the coach, right? And the quarterback. So the quarterback is kind of an on the field, out in the field leader, while of course the coach is on the sidelines. They are certainly a decision maker and a leader. And if you take that to baseball, the pitcher, right? The pitcher decides what pitch to throw, even though they're working with the catcher and there's coaches and managers looking at them. Ultimately, they can throw whatever they want. The point guard in basketball, the person that typically starts with the ball goes down the court is, you know, they're given plays from the coach and from other team members, but

they can kind of decide where they want to go with the ball. Soccer, strikers, right? Strikers that start with the ball on kickoff and midfielders, those kinds of folks, they take it down, they can see what's going on and those kinds of things. And again, the key to remember, regardless of any of these leadership positions, just like project teams, just like response, just like incident management teams, these leadership positions, these decision makers can't do it by themselves. So while certainly they can give us that intent, while certainly they are in the box at the top of the org chart, often, they're not doing it alone. And that's key, right? So who are the operators? Who are the doers kind of in these sports? Running backs, big time in football,

right? They get the ball, they got to go through against big humans and catch the ball wide receivers, the line, right? That's executing the play to move people out of the way in football, American football. And then on the defensive side, the defensive backs, the linebackers, the line, trying to stop what's happening there. So they're an operational kind of thing. And similar with other sports, like the field positions, the folks that are in partnership, certainly with those other positions I talked about with the quarterbacks and the pitchers and kind of the field leaders. And, of course, following in the directions of coaches.

And if you notice in sports teams, especially big, either high school or college or certainly pro, there's the head coach, then there's a bunch of assistant coaches, then there's coaches under them. So the org chart goes out and it spreads out and we'll get into some of these things like span of control. So you don't end up having all 57 staff reporting to just the head coach. It's broken out to a manageable span of control. And that span of control, ideally, is five, right? It's between three to seven that you want to have direct reports. So that's a good concept to think about when you're either on the fly trying to pull together an org chart, or you're in an incident command system class or a project team, just think about that's pretty good thing. And so what I ask you the listeners to do is think about your

organizations, your organizational charts within your reporting structure, or even just within your company. And think about how many folks report to you, or how many of you report to your boss and so on. And just kind of consider, have we optimized our sparing and control. And so if you are leading projects or responses, make sure that you kind of are, right? You don't want to have tons of people reporting to you. You know, it's just, it's less safe in dangerous positions. And it's just hard to maintain communication and relationships that way without some decentralization, right?

Shout out to Jocko Willink and the Extreme Ownership folks there. But it's true, right? You want to break down that reporting structure. And so, you know, who else is in organizations for sports? So we have all the people doing the playing, making the decisions, calling the plays, but without stuff, right, we can't do anything. So that's logistics. That's like UPS. That's the equipment managers, the facility folks. You know, we can't do anything without them across any sport.

We certainly can't do that without planning, right? Coaches planning plays together, the owners, the general managers planning who's going to be on the team? Who are we going to trade and talk about a cutthroat businessman trading folks, you know, five folks for one superstar and not getting into that. I'm not even that familiar with the sports world, but, but that's, that's a lot of planning that goes on behind the scenes that you don't necessarily see until that superstar or the group of folks show up on the field and do or don't win championships and those kind of things. So that's kind of my sports analogy for organization. So as we move towards, you know, projects and other, you know, team structures, think about sports

and how you would draw like the org structure for say your favorite football team or soccer, you know, soccer team or baseball team, something like that. It's the same kind of thing that we would do in business, which we'll get into. The other very org structure focused organization entities, right, are militaries from all around the world, right? There are certainly clear leaders in the military. They're the commanding officer, the executive officer, your senior enlisted folks, right? So your commanding officers over every one of every rank in a certain area or command or the whole military, depending on how high up you go with this order chart. The executive officer is right there with them.

They may have kind of a shift in different areas. And then your senior enlisted certainly is over all the enlisted folks there and indirectly really kind of leads some of the junior officers as well. You have someone that's been around for a long time. They may not be commissioned, but they certainly know what's going on more so than maybe the new officer. So good thing to listen to out there if you're a new officer. The operations folks, infantry, special forces, artillery, medics, corpsmen, the folks out there doing the work right under the command of these folks are your doers or your operations folks. So just think about how you'd line up those blocks kind of across the different specialties. Logistics, you know, engineers and CBs, certainly you have those folks, the motor

pool folks, you know, whole technicians for the Navy, engine men, you know, anyone that's kind of keeping the facilities going, the machinery working, the ammunition moving, the food flowing, right? Nobody wins a war without logistics, you know, patent, I may not have paraphrased that correctly. But it's true, right? If your folks can't eat, they're not going anywhere. If they don't have vehicles, it's going to take a lot longer. If they don't have ammunition, they can't fight. So think about all these connecting org structures military wise. And then planning, certainly the leaders of teams, intelligence community tries, you know, to give some information there

to then make tactical decisions based off of your division officers. So a level down from being in charge of maybe the whole unit or a whole company or the whole command, you've got folks in charge of these different divisions. And it depends on the service on what you call the different structures. But again, in the military, very rank based, right? And then even within those ranks depends on what kind of command you're at. Are you in a ranger battalion where you have the same ranks, but everyone there is kind of qualified the same?

Or, you know, generally on a ship where you have a whole mix of different ratings for the Navy, but rank structure is the same as it is, you know, in a SEAL team, but they're all SEALs, right? So think about your org charts, your boxes again, that's what an organization is. So when we think about marrying up this organizational chart, that's going to help make the tactics that are going to meet the objectives we made previously, that are going to help us align with the leader's intent, just in your head, always be thinking about kind of who's who, who's doing what, what are the levels of authority, and that will help us kind of bring those up. And in the military, again, military is all across the world pretty much, but, you know, speak for the U.S. military, I guess, having been in it, it's very prescribed, right?

And hopefully with good leadership and good command, there's some give and take on kind of how we do that, but some of it is pretty kind of written in stone. So I talked about one of the areas that I really learned about organization and being able to on the fly create an organization is from the Incident Command System, Incident Management Team experience that I had. And so that is extremely prescribed from the standpoint of who's in what box. And so if you're in public safety, you've probably hopefully heard this before, emergency management or other fields that use the incident command system a lot.

And so I'll kind of briefly go through the standard org structure of the incident command system and incident management team. So there are certainly leaders, right? These are your incident commanders or unified commanders, which means you have a few incident commanders from different specialties or jurisdictions. You have agency administrators, and I mentioned that in a previous show, or a few of them. This is like the mayor that asked you to come help after a tornado, or the department head that asked you to help come organize some big event or something like that, or the owner of the sport organization event that's doing the marathon that you're going to coordinate all the public safety for.

So very prescriptive from the incident command, a unified command and agency administrator perspective operations, there's what's called a whole section, right? And anyone doing the work out there is in that operation section. And within there, there's branches and divisions and groups and teams and strike teams or task forces and strike teams, single resources. So a person that's a specialist, like, you know, speak of now in this pandemic, like epidemiologists, disease experts, right, certainly are, are single resources that can help out multiple organizations in planning, there's a planning section, right planning section chief, this is where I lived. That's what I did. And so we are not in charge of writing the plan but we facilitate the process to write the plan

just like project managers right so we may document the plan but we're going to help hopefully build that with this team of experts we're going to assemble that can give us the right tactics tasks etc to meet the objectives that we have there's a logistics section as well there's a finance section so very clear what these sections focus on and then you get into there's a logistics section as well. There's a finance section. So very clear what these sections focus on. And then you get into there's a whole bunch of, you know, a whole bunch of kind of units within each of these sections as well that have subspecialties within them. So, you know, consider, as I say, these really prescriptive command system things. How does this apply to project teams, right? Do you have or do you break out your leadership kind of command

structure and then your operational folks and then your planning folks, your logistics folks, your finance folks? If not, maybe consider that. We're going to get into some of those standard concepts as well. And I think, again, I've bridged the incident command system stuff to proper, so to speak, project management as a project manager, professional and senior project manager now by trade, because it works right in the directly applicable. And so here's some key concepts. I mentioned this one already span of control. So we won't go over it again, fully. But just as a reminder, you just don't want a lot of people reporting to one person. So think about, you know, not maxing that out at the most seven to one is your ratio, you want to get there, ideally five, unity of command. And if you've been in projects, either on a team or leading them, or

unity of command means everyone reports to one person, right? So there's a single kind of thing. So I don't get 10 tasks from 10 different people. And the greatest example of this not working well is an office space, right? When the main character says, you know, if I mess up, I hear about it from like three people. Well, that's not good. That's not good for team cohesion, for effectiveness, for efficiency, any of those kinds of things. So you want to have a unity of command where we are all working together. And it means that there's one reporting structure, meaning I report to one boss, my boss reports to one boss, those kind of things. And then unified command means that we are working together.

So I mentioned, let's say, a police, a fire, an EMS, leaders all together. That's a unified command. In the private sector, in the project world, let's say there's a finance, an HR, a supply chain, an IT folks working together. That's unified. But in the project world, we call that like a steering committee, or some sort of council or something like that, less command focused, you know, more kind of group private sector verbiage focus, but it's the same thing. That's high level leaders working together and agreeing on objectives, and then letting their folks figure out the tactics and operations and then coming up with

the plan and then executing a plan. Same thing. So those are, I think, three key things to think about that directly translate really well from public safety and incident management to project management, program management, product management, all those kind of things, Hispanic control, unity of command, and unified command. So in thinking about those concepts and how we can apply them, there's another concept that I really like that I've carried to project management that's functional teams, right? The other kind of breakout in incident command, incident management is geographic focused teams, but you can have functional teams within geography and there's a whole kind of thing, which basically means you

can move these teams that are all working together on the same thing within a map kind of area, so to speak. So applicable to the private sector, right? You could have divisions, the Europe division, the North American division, that's geographic, just like an incident management. You could have division one, division A, division North, division South, that kind of thing, and then have teams within those. So a functional team, you know, the key link is, you know, who does what together based on function.

And I'll give some examples here in a second. So when you think about your organization, you're going to pull together quickly, or if you have time because it's a planned event or a project where you have time, how are you going to group these folks together in similar themes so that they work together how they usually work together, right?

Because sometimes you have to make a totally different org where these certain specialties haven't worked together. But often I've found, particularly in IT, healthcare, those kind of, you know, folks have typically worked together, even if they're not, you know, all clinical or all technical or all finance or all something. So you could have kind of these functional teams together. Where do the resources cross over? Kind of like I just mentioned. So where should there be crossover? Where's the good connecting points that they work together? And, you know, a good example is if you're doing software development and maintenance and use like the system development lifecycle, how throughout each of those phases

do resources work together? Where does one hand off to the other? You know, when you're designing something, you know, who does that? And then when you're getting ready to test it, who puts that plan together? And when you're reviewing that and and then you put it in production, and you know, all these kind of things, just think about that so that you can set your org up and it can be dynamic, right? The org chart, once you make it isn't carved in stone, just like those objectives we talked about, right? We want to be really good up front, but if something changes critical, then change them. So your org chart for sure, but try and set it up as much as you can, you know, to work and then who can make decisions. What's, what's the decision making level? What's that line of decision making that we need to go to? And along with that is escalation path, right?

Who escalates to who, for what issues and for what are the triggers there? Like, oh, we have to spend this amount of money. Okay. That requires an authorization. I need to go to this person or that affects this number of people. So when we know that, we're going to escalate those kinds of things. So these are all kind of the nuance, but maybe what you could set as triggers or guides, right, for folks when they make org charts,

if you're leading a project office, project management office, or you're leading the planning section or the incident commander, think about the guidance you want to give to your team as they're going to make organizations to meet those objectives to fall under leaders intent. So let's get into some examples, right? First, again, naming conventions, keep it simple, KISS method, keep it simple, stupid, as they say, right? Be direct. Don't make some fancy name that nobody knows what the, what that box means,

what that group means, what that, you know, team is, um, like I said, make it obvious. So group together like skills and resources, right? Um, and, and if you need more resources, get them. But what I mean is, and here's some examples using a group concept and a group that comes from the incident command system concept is System concept is folks that you pull together that can be a mix of resources that are all working toward the same thing so they don't have to have the exact same job. And they are functional by nature. So you can have a technology group.

And within that technology group, as an example, you can have information security, you can have developers, you can have IT testing, you can have different analysts, different technical things, networking, but it's all technical focus, right? A very technical group. Go figure. And then a clinical group, right? So you have a group of nurses and doctors and other providers. So you can get that clinical perspective. And I'm using these examples because I'm in healthcare IT right now. And so that's a good thing. So if we have a technical group to cover the tech stuff, we have a clinical group to cover the clinical stuff, then we want a PMO slash policy group, right? So we want folks that are helping look at the whole program or project or product and that are our policy level decision

makers. So that helps define where we need to send those kind of policy things as we set those guardrails for folks and a finance group, right? So all the different aspects of finance of accounting and expenses and payroll and all these kinds of things, but they're all focused on finance. So if you think about it, if I know who's the sponsor at the top, and maybe who's the business owner right under them, and then who's the project or program manager right with them, then I know we have a technical group with all our tech folks, then we have a technical group with all our tech folks. Then we have a clinical group with all our clinical folks. Then we have a PMO policy group that's probably comprised of some of those folks at the top,

plus maybe our steering committee folks in a box up at the right maybe. Then we have a finance group working with all those. We have a pretty straightforward understanding of who's in each. Now under those then, I do like to say the names of the person and then what part of that. So the technical group, who's the person, what is their focus? So John Smith, information security, Jane Doe, programming, and on and on, right? So do that throughout your group. So one, we know what the group's focused on, and two, we know who owns what space in that group. So in these groups, and just conceptually, that kind of assumes that we have a decent number of

folks and they could be a mix right an information security person is a different kind of expert than an analyst data analyst let's say then a developer than a tester so you have mixed resources there that are working all together whereas you'll see here let's say we have you know a couple from each and IT specific we'll just do this we have the network here, let's say we have, you know, a couple from each and it specific, we'll just do this, we have the network team. So let's say we have a couple network folks, they're both networking folks, and that's all they're focused on. And then we have a development team and a testing team, and information security team. So within each of those teams, that's all

they do. Now, what we could do is take all those teams, put them together, go up and make a group. That's kind of the nuance of how you want to break it out. Do you want more or less boxes? Do you have more or less people? And let's say you have even less people, meaning you have a single resource, then you just have that person. So you could have, let's say we had, you know, the first thing we looked at groups, there was a technical group, a clinical group, a PMO policy group, and a finance group, right? So four boxes. Well, those four boxes are comprised of multiple people. So in the teams, we can have less people within those teams, and still four boxes, or we can have four boxes that are single people, right? So just

think about how you want to set that up. And it doesn't matter kind of how many are in each of those boxes, as long as underneath, let's say for the group, each group has kind of a leader or supervisor, same thing for the team. And then the single resources, they just kind of report directly up to whoever that is, whether it's your business owner, the project manager, if they have delegated authority, their own manager, if they're incorporated in the project, and that's it. So what you do want to do, again, whether it's a group of teams, just teams, or single resources together on the org chart, is have their name in the box plus their area of responsibility. So make it straightforward.

It's really good to practice making organizational charts for your teams. And I would just start practice doing it now. If you could start a project on having a barbecue, like I mentioned, you know, writing objectives for that. And the last episode, think about who you would need to do that. Or take a real project you have, and really try and optimize, you know, if you're looking back at, you know, a project you already did go back and look at how would I have done this organization differently? Would I have made it functional, because it's all in one area, and we're going to have these groups that are combined, you know, combinations of all these

different kinds of resources together? Or do we have just resources that are singular and we're just going to map them out? If you are launching like a big product, right, globally, you know, do you have a European division and an Asian division and North American division and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then within those divisions, do you have functional teams or groups or whatever you're going to do, but, you know, it's kind of fun to get good at doing organizations, organizational structures, it really spells out who's doing what. And visually, when you go, let's say to a kickoff meeting, or you're doing a briefing before folks go out in the field, or even if you're talking to the leadership agency administrators, and you have a rough idea, look, here's what

we're thinking. I'm thinking if we pull these kinds of people together, we can kind of do this. And it's good to do that early and then change it when your operations folks actually say what we're going to do, the tactics we're going to use to actually meet those objectives. But it's always good to jot it down. You can do it pretty quickly and then refine it as you go. So I have been fortunate from you all based on feedback to refine the show. I hope you're enjoying this run of really diving into more of these foundational five things that I think are key for folks that are pulling teams together, that are responding, that are just trying to get a handle on what's happening. If you want to see what's happening with the show, check out peopleprocessprogress.com.

Always do posts for these episodes, a little backlogged on getting the old episodes up there as far as you know, archive, but all the episodes are available on Apple, Spotify, all the all the really platforms, which is great. Thank you so much. Reach out to me on Facebook, people at people process progress or Instagram, same thing, or email me at peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com. Thank you all so much. Please stay safe out there. Wash your hands, and Godspeed.