"Agile, cross-functional, with a flat hierarchy - this is how companies organize themselves in the digital age!" - One or zero
If you want your offer to be more than just a passing fad, you need to find a way to turn your exciting mission into a sustainable business model.
The main goal is to find the offer that is made possible by an organisation that the clients pay. You will find several possibilities. Higher value for customers does not necessarily mean higher costs. In fact, with targeted innovation, costs are lower.
An organization is a machine that consists mainly of two parts; people and culture. The first point can be planned. People have skills, fit into a structure, follow a process, and seek recognition. The right mix of these factors leads to the competence of your organization. This is the first step from a strategic mission to a sustainable business model. Play through different variations to find the combination that best serves your strategic goal.
Culture , on the other hand, cannot be controlled directly, but it can be influenced. To achieve culture, you need to create an environment where everyone understands what is meaningful and where the journey is leading. Values, ways of thinking and behaviours evolve over time. The culture is the result of your leadership decisions from the past.
Are you still busy or are you already creating value? Start with the process organisation and design the process for value creation first. The activities between people and machines can best be derived from the process. Structural models such as organisational structures and role concepts, while useful, rarely make your customers happy. Create them only after you agree on the value creation process. Avoid structures that are built for the sake of hierarchies.
The best managers are those who know they don't have all the answers. Always start from the customer's point of view. You can get information from the customer himself, or from the frontline staff.
You can now create user stories from the activities in the business process. These are small stories consisting of a few sentences that describe a self-contained action of an employee. Actually, user stories are meant for the project teams to describe an interaction with a system. I already start doing this during the conception phase.
Because with user stories you only write down a few pieces of information: Who wants to achieve what goal, and the process for achieving that goal. This results in only a few sentences per story. You leave out most of the details of a clean requirements specification. This way you focus on the important functions.
With the value creation process, the structural organization, and the user stories, you can define the different system boundaries. Each system has a technological specialty that makes it stand out in the market. The user stories give you a good basis for how the interaction with systems could look. Be inspired by the diversity of the market. Your process is not set in stone and can be adapted at any time.
In-house development is appropriate when it comes to automating very specific processes or when you want to stand out from the market with a special function. For this, I always recommend a little more specification. With the conceptual tools described above, the project risk is too high.
