The best work organization is using teams. We’ve known this for ages. Humans have been doing job specialization long before they even had a word for it. This is responsible for our success and for who we are, intimately. It explains the modern fascination with our deeply-seated sense of self. As well as the remarkable capacity we have to do work collaboratively.
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
Quick: what are your staffers doing at this very second? If you’re like most organizations, there’s a good chance many of your staffers are attending to personal matters. But who says it’s acceptable just because it happens in other offices too?
According to a recent survey of 2,000 office workers conducted by AtTask and Harris Interactive – experts in management and market research – employees at various firms said they only dedicate 45 percent of their time to getting stuff done. The remainder (55%) of the time gets spent sifting through emails, or in meetings that could easily be replaced by conference calls. Also on the list of common pastime activities was “miscellaneous interruptions.”
In a previous article, we promised you a better insight on how we are organized internally, namely the product-oriented teams we built. So, let’s start to review the teams 🙂
This software engineering team is handling the low-level aspects of our software engineering, i.e. most of the stuff other teams need in order to develop their products. Because we are lazy, we like to keep things standardized. 😀 This means that all frameworks (with one exception) are developed at this level.
Until recently, 4PSA has had a pretty standard organization, with function-based departments – Sales and Marketing, Software Development (with many teams), Technical Support, Administration, Human Resources etc. This worked decently for many years and that is why I still recommend it as the default organization for any company really focused on a single product.
Organizing a software company can look like rocket science nowadays. But it shouldn’t be!
Apparently, most startups are unorganized. In other words, when someone who previously worked for a large entity joins the team, they are surprised at the lack of organization. Later on, they are even more surprised to learn that many things actually work better that way.