Educause 2008
A Flotilla of Crafts:
Organizing to Maximize IT
Vince Kellen
Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium
[email protected]
Copyright Vince Kellen, 2008. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for
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Agenda
 Objective
• Share our experience in how we restructured IT at DePaul University
 Context
• What precipitated the need to examine the organization’s structure?
 Process
• How did we go about rolling out a new structure?
 Outcomes
• What did we learn along the way?
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Why restructure?
 Background
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Transition in leadership in 2002/2003
Major ERP implementation in 1999. First upgrades looming
Student and faculty use of technology growing considerably
Perception of IT was weak, IT hadn’t ‘learned’ ERP
Needed to do more with less, manage 12% budget cuts
 Old structure
• Four major departments, four directors, four sets of budgets, four
administrative assistants
• Some redundancies (security, project management)
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Hopes for the new structure
 Improve collaboration, reduce IT infighting
• Infighting results from lack of perceived usefulness
 Become more agile
• Handle projects of various sizes (big and small), compressed time frames
 Improve IT employee loyalty and commitment
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Leadership development
Promote increased skill development in a team-oriented manner
Lateral moves early and late in career
Move IT decision-making down a level
 Improve IT productivity
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Connect IT employee passion with meaningful work/roles
Improve the rate of knowledge acquisition
Remove as many redundancies as possible
Increase the number of projects IT can manage
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Organizational designs
 Functional
• Align employees with business functions
• Align employees with IT functions
 Matrix
• Have dual reporting relationships where IT employees report to an IT technical
function and a university business function or internal client
 Project
• Employees are assigned from their functional units, but also assigned to
projects under project manager facilitation
 Network
• Loosely coupled, but integrated units
• Flatter, perhaps without a predetermined hierarchy
• Decentralized planning, independence
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Another model
 Knowledge-based organizational design
• What critical capabilities, or know-how, contributes to IT’s success and the
university’s strategy? (RBV/DCA school of strategy)
• How can that knowledge be continually refined and leveraged?
 Not unlike academic departments arranged in a college or school
• Each unit has its own rigor, standards of work and review, culture
• Units need to identify when and how they will work with each other
• Units need to be mutually exclusive
 Our model is essentially a network model, with some modifications
• Total quality management framework (ISO 9001:2000) specifies integration
between units and overall service levels
• Planning is coordinated across units, with some unit planning
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New organization key concepts
 Crafts
• Manage a set of difficult activities that require time to learn
• The craft contributes to the university strategy, has valuable
knowledge
• Can be focused on IT knowledge or business unit knowledge
• Is the ‘natural’ place for individual technical skill development
• Are enduring
 Projects
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A temporary structure to accomplish a specific goal
Have business cases and clear linkages to the strategy
Are assigned team members from multiple crafts
Is a useful place for leadership development
Give IT staff a chance to learn new skills
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Craft and project leaders
 Craft leaders
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Must have good general communication skills
Need to develop the knowledge and skill of the craft members
Need to develop a technical or functional vision for their craft
Manage the technical aspects of all project work
 Project leaders
• Must have good project communication skills
• Can come from the Project Management craft or from any other craft
• Are responsible for project due dates, managing scope, negotiating for
resources with craft leaders
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Managing director
 Managing directors
• Are considered coaches or mentors for craft leaders
• Are assigned craft leaders for 6-18 months at a time
– Assignment is based IT goals for the year, managing director and craft leader fit
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Need to have broader communication and client relationship skills
Do not have to be highly technical
Handle conflict resolution
Make critical budget decisions
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Old structure
VP
Exec. Director
Information Services
Director
Director
Director
Director
Customer Services
Application Services
Systems Support
Network & Telco
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New structure
VP, IS
Managing
Director
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Managing
Director
Managing
Director
Managing
Director
Managing
Director
IS Operations
Project & process
management
Enterprise Architecture
Operating and storage
systems
Database and data
warehouse systems
Enterprise application
administration
Business continuity and
security
Portal
Instructional Technology
Web design
ERP Systems
CRM systems
Technology contact
center
Field support services LPC
Field support services Loop
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More about crafts
 The 15 crafts do not exist within any permanent hierarchy
 A deeper hierarchy is not needed to manage work activity. Craft leaders
make key operational decisions regarding their crafts.
 MDs are a resource to help craft leaders
 The crafts naturally align in several common value chain patterns
• Contact center -> Field Services
• Contact center -> ERP, CRM, Portal, Database, Operating and storage
systems
• Contact center, Field Services -> Business continuity and security
• Enterprise architecture -> ERP, CRM, Portal, Database, OSS
 A TQM can specify cross-craft integration
 Let other arrangements of the operational value chain emerge
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Three critical crafts
 Project and process management (PMO office)
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Responsible for managing all projects, negotiating with craft leaders
Responsible for managing the total quality management framework
Craft members can learn new things outside their role while on a project
This craft represents an enormous amount of horizontal communication and
knowledge flow across the organization
 Enterprise architecture
• Responsible for long-term architectural planning and short torm decision
monitoring and control
• Also involved heavily in many crafts
• Network and telecommunications architecture resides here, hence no N&T
craft
 IS Operations
• Manages all IS budgets, HR hiring processes, metrics publishing
• ISOPS allows other crafts to become “administration-free zones”
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Total Quality Management framework
 We chose ISO 9001:2000 because it was an incumbent framework
 It helps all of IT become skilled in defining and managing
processes
 The audit cycles promote process reuse, metrics and preparation
 It adds an element of stability and simplicity, offsetting somewhat
the fluid nature of a knowledge-based network organization
structure
 TQM lives and breathes at the craft leader level. Quality becomes
more “bottom up”
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Two key processes
 Architecture review
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The enterprise architecture craft manages this process
All projects go through some measure of architecture review
The process involves the user community
Decision making is more bottom up and communal, requiring assent of
the business unit requesting the technology, the enterprise
architecture craft, the MDs and VP
 After action reviews (AAR)
• In the case of major system failures or near misses, anyone in the
organizational structure can initiate an AAR
• AARs have an MD sponsor, but the team members involved do the
research and come up with recommended actions
• Responsible for diagnosing and correcting error is bottom-up
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Other structures, meetings, communication
 The organization makes use of ad-hoc communities
• Innovation team
• Software engineering community of practice
 Craft leaders meet weekly to discuss issues, typically without MDs
present
 MDs meet weekly to discuss future activities
 MDs and craft leaders talk continuously through the week
 MDs talk continuously among themselves
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Structure versus culture
 Structure can allow for improvement, but by itself is insufficient
 A powerful set of ideas, embedded in leadership and in the culture
over time, provides a bigger contribution
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Passion-driven organization
Person first, role second
Lateral versus hierarchical development
Leadership development
Learning plans
Tours of duty
Cross-training
Multiple assessments
Planned exits
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Rolling it out
 We had to move some people out of current leadership roles
 We had to shift some leaders into new areas
 We used a signup sheet in which staff could sign up for a
craft of their choice to gain maximum staff buy-in
 We invested in a year-long leadership development program
 Change begins with talking. We talked, and talked and
talked…
 We made periodic modifications, but in close collaboration
with craft leaders
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Desired Outcomes
Benefit
Team
Expertise
++
Team Expertise =
Superior
Solution
++ Passion
++ Passion/role alignment
++ Team/passion ensemble
++ Team self-assessment
Can individuals and teams accept
being average?
0
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Cost
++
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Actual outcomes
 A significant increase in knowledge of the ERP system (and other
key technologies)
• Two upgrades, two teams
• Tours of duty program distributed ERP knowledge
 Avoided millions in consulting for two major ERP system upgrades
(32,000 and 21,000 hours each)
 Improved the number of projects completed each year from about
10-20 to 50-70
• Incentives for project versus maintenance work
 Turnover was about 10%
 All this while absorbing reductions
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Lessons learned
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Designing and implementing a new structure is hard work. It takes continual
monitoring at several levels. May take several months to get right
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Some activities in IT defy bundling into a cohesive unit
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You can’t eliminate all redundancy. You can only decide what redundancy isn’t
significant enough to remove
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Change is stressful. Coaching and personal investment of time in key staff is
critical
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The new structure was confusing at first, so we had to adjust midway to allow craft
leaders time to “learn” autonomy
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This structure is “chatty” requiring daily and ongoing communication
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An understanding and supportive HR department is most helpful
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Educate the rest of the university. Publish clear contact points
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More information
 A detailed case study describing this organizational design is
available at Cutter Consortium’s web site
• “Building a Craft-Based IT Organization: A Case Study” by Vince Kellen
• https://cutter.com/cgi-bin/catalog/store.cgi?action=link&sku=RP62BD0803
 I am available for questions and follow up at:
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (630) 715-6017
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