I see this problem all the time. A manager with an unachievable span of control.
I inherited a department several years ago. One of the team leader in my department was running a project that had 30 people on it. The team had no structure within it. Some people were overworked, some had no work. The team leader had no training. And the project was going poorly.
And then his wife called me. He was going in to crisis.
He was stressed from trying to take in all this information from thirty different people and pass it to the right people. He wasn’t delegating. He wasn’t giving or receiving feedback. It was spilling into his marriage. It was spilling into his parenthood.
He entered a 60-day rehabilitation facility to get his life back on track and regain his resilience.
I was heartbroken, he’s the nicest guy anybody has ever met. And this was not his fault.
His team did have 30 people’s worth of work. His team needed to be a team of teams.
I built this framework to help me ensure this never happens again on my watch.
Pizza Shop Example
I worked in a restaurant that sold pizza, sandwiches, pasta, salads and drinks for take-out or dine-in. Fifteen people would work together to deliver $10k of business on a busy night in the summer of 1997. That would easily be $20k today.
We organized this way:
- Pizza and Sandwich Station
- Salad Station
- Pasta Station
- Wait staff
- Delivery drivers
- Cash Out/Phone/Order Assembly
Our process worked like this:
- All orders – delivery, take out, dine in – went into a Point of Sale System.
- The POS would create Order Slips which printed out at the appropriate food station.
- If someone ordered a pepperoni pizza, a coke, and a side salad – three tickets would be printed:
- one at the pizza station – with only the pizza info and order #,
- one at the salad station – with only the salad info and order #,
- one at the cash register – with entire order contents and order #
The person who ran the cash register and answered the phones was the key integration point. They’d pour the drink, assemble the customer’s order from the compontents from the various stations, and hand the assembled order to the either take-out customer, or the wait staff or the delivery driver.
Most of the sales happened at lunch time and dinner time. Those rushes were insane. But for those two 2 hour blocks, this structure enabled:
- The pizza station could focus on making perfect pizzas.
- The salad station on delicious, crisp salads.
In the down time we’d make the dough, sauce, prep the salads, and goof off recapping our success. It was so fun.
The food was amazing. We’d see hundreds of people return each Friday. It was their family tradition. I still eat there when I’m in town.
I structure every team as though it’s this pizza shop.
I’ll describe some principles, and close with a complex system team which I believe is organizaed like a pizza shop.
A 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 is a group of people interdependant in achieving a shared goal. You need a team when the goal is:
- At a greater scale than one person’s bandwidth, or
- Of broader scope than one person’s expertise.
In other words, the solution to complexity is divide and conquor. But a team brings with it’s own complexity.
Here’s how to manage that.
𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘁𝘆
I’ll use my family as an example. It started out as my wife and I.
There is one relationship:
- Me – Wife
We had a child. There are now three people. And there are three relationships
- Me – Wife
- Me – Child
- Wife – Child
We had another child. There are now 4 people.
This does not just add 1 relationship, this adds 3 relationships.
Read that again: Going from 3 to 4 people doubles the number of relationships.
- Me – Wife
- Me – Child 1
- Wife – Child 1
- Me – Child 2
- Wife – Child 2
- Child1 – Child 2
 |
In the image below, each person represents a dot. And each line between the dots represents an relationship and a communication path.
The relatioship between people and relationships is geometric, not linear
For every person (n) there are n(n-1)/2 relationships.
Team size 3 = 3*(3-1)/2 = 3 relationships
Team size 4 = 4*(4-1)/2 = 6 relationships
Team size 12 =12*(12-1) = 66 relationships
Each relationship is a communication path:
• 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 flows along this line – marketing data, engineering data, financial data,
• 𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗘𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 flow along each line:
🢣 𝗘𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗶𝘁𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 – shared purpose, excitement, celebration, frustration, confusion, strong opinions, etc.
🢣 𝗘𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲 – weekends, weddings, funerals, pets, etc.
𝗝𝗲𝗳𝗳 𝗕𝗲𝘇𝗼𝘀 says a team shall not be larger than that can be fed with 2 pizzas. He is establishing a maximum team size.
Others say a team should be 8±3 people max.
𝘽𝙪𝙩 𝙄 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙖 𝙩𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙤𝙛 𝟯𝟬. 𝙃𝙤𝙬 𝙙𝙤 𝙄 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙖 “𝙏𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙤𝙛 𝙏𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙨”?
Some teams just have more scope than can be fed by 2 pizzas.
- The James Webb Space Telescope took 10,000 people to design and build.
- A large grocery store might have 60 people working at any given time.
- I ran a project with 160 people on it.
The New York and Erie Railroad took an organization of 4,715 people to maintain in 1855.
Is this a team? Let’s revisit the definition:
A 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 is a group of people interdependant in achieving a shared goal.
These 4,715 people were interdependant and aligned on maintaining 435 miles of railroad. Yes it’s a team!
Yikes!
If they all needed to communicate to each other, that would be over 11 Million relationships. But they built a structure dividing the responsibilities into smaller chunks.
The New York and Erie Railroad’s Org Chart is believed to be the first org chart ever created. It is in the Library of Congress as linked from the image. It’s a work of art!
The organization is divided by geographical superintendants (East, Delaware, Susquehana, Buffalo). These manage particular train lines and the people needed to operate it including: conductors, baggage loaders, brakemen, engineman, fireman, carpenters, blacksmiths, and etc.
They’ve also consolodated their wood supply into a “General Wood Agent” under which the railroad’s own sawmills are operated.
Payroll rolls up to the Treasurer.
A land surveyor and taxpayer roll up to the Land Agent.
And so on.
Divide and Conquor
The solution to complexity is to divide and conquor.
This happens in both the pizza shop and the New York Erie Railroad examples.
But deciding where to divide requires a new concept: Organizational Design.
𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀:
1. An Organizational Structure cannot be created without creating Silos. Silos are an unavoidable byproduct of structure.
2. Silos create focus, and clarity when put in the right places.
3. Communcation Process between silos ensures the right information flows between the teams. This can be meetings, documents, or standards.
“We didn’t need every member of the Task Force to know everyone else; we just needed everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunked next door or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival.” – Stanley McChrystal, “Team of Teams”
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝗯 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺
The JWST took 10,000 people 30 years to design and build. They built a team of teams. Here’s a look at part of their structure.
The JWST has 4 instruments on board. Each of these instruments has explicity goals and was designed by a different organization:
• Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) – European Space Agency (ESA)
• Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) – Jet Propulsion Laboratory/European Space Agency
• Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) – University of Arizona
• Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) – Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
Here is how it looks on their System Architetural Diagram:
Each team is in a “silo” of scope.
For instance, the team building the NIRSpec is not responsible for the MIRI.
This silo facilitates focus and execution.
This allows focus on the technical challenges of building the most complex Near-Infrared Spectrograph ever developed which cost about $500M alone.
All four of these instruments mount onto the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM). This is where they share space, mounting, power, cooling.
Recall the Pizza Shop – the cash register was the order integration point. That person would take the contributions from the other stations and integrate them into the customer order.
The ISIM team is the integration point, integrating the contributions from the teams below it. The ISIM cost about $2B to develop. The entire JWST cost $8.8B to develop and another $1.2B to operate over it’s 5-10 year life span.
This is how you structure a team. Whether a a railroad or a $10B telescope, make it look like a Pizza Shop.
Hopefully this now seems obvious.
But I have seen many many complicated teams get this wrong.
Ciao,
Evan
- McCallum, D. C., Henshaw, G. H. & New York And Erie Railroad Company, P. (1855) New York and Erie Railroad diagram representing a plan of organization: exhibiting the division of academic duties and showing the number and class of employés engaged in each department: from the returns of September
. [New York: New York and Erie Railroad Company] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017586274/.