Vancouver Organizational Design @vanorgdesign - Tumblr Blog

Some tough news: Buffer has made 10 layoffs, 11% of the team. We want to share openly how we got here, the financial details and how we’re moving forward.

A sad but detailed outline of how Buffer grew too fast, hired too many, and had to prune it all back by letting go of good people.

When the new Senior VP of Engineering took over at a major Silicon Valley tech company a few years back, the first thing he had to do was freeze hiring. The company had been growing rapidly and their engineering team had hired aggressively, but they had reached a point where each new engineer they added to the team decreased overall productivity. The issue was not their hiring process. Problems began when the (very qualified) engineers arrived and were haphazardly onboarded. Without clear training on organizational processes or integration into the team, new employees were unprepared and ineffective. As a result, the company had to stop expanding and put in place processes so that hiring new employees served its purpose of increasing productivity. It took them several months to design an onboarding program that effectively brought engineers up to speed, and the added expense of solving this retroactively was huge.

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. Fred Brooks cited the paper and the idea in his elegant classic "The Mythical Man-Month," calling it "Conway's Law." The name stuck. - Wikepedia Join us for our first VanOrgDesign gathering of the year: exploring how the structure of engineering teams in technology companies impacts the way products are built.

Our February 28th event has been posted! Grab a ticket while they’re available.

If you aren’t proactive about making your meetings better, they’ll stay mediocre.

#meetings

In our 2-day Bootcamp, our Team Designers at NOBL will equip you with everything you need to know to form and lead a high performing team. Moreover, you'll leave with inspiration and concrete new ways of working from organizations like Amazon, Medium, Warby Parker, Etsy, Facebook, and Apple.

The NOBL team have announced dates and locations for their Team Design Bootcamps for 2017, including April 18th & 19th in Vancouver.

We’ll work on scheduling a social meetup around this time as well.

#NOBL #workshop #team design #bootcamp #Vancouver

Every MBA program teaches you how to build an org for the 20th century, not today

Salim Ismail

#MBA #Salim Ismail

…most people have thought jobs without being given much time to think, which is the equivalent of making a ditch-digger work without a shovel. Maybe this is why productivity growth is half of what it used to be.

Lazy Work, Good Work, by Collaborative Fund

Lots of good writing on the difference between labouring and getting something done, when increasingly a lot of work is knowledge work.

#knowledge work

Change agility is an organization’s culture of continually practicing significant changes.

Cloud Lock-in and Change Agility An engineering-centric post about how to think about & work with development platforms, and how companies can less easily insulate themselves from major changes. Thus, organizations should practice these major changes.

#change agility #engineering

(via Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace - YouTube)

“Job satisfaction and strength of relationships, there ain’t no app for that”

(direct link to quote)

“We put [Millenials] in corporate environments that care more about the numbers than they do about the kids. They care more about the short term gains than the long term life of this young human being. … we are putting them in corporate environments that aren’t helping them build their confidence, that aren’t helping them learn the skills of cooperation, that aren’t helping them overcome the challenges of the digital world and finding more balance. That isn’t helping them overcome the need to have instant gratification and teach them the joys and impact and fulfillment you get from working hard on something for a long time that cannot be done in a month or even in a year. And so we are thrusting them into corporate environments and the worst part about it is they think it’s them. They blame themselves. … I’m here to tell them it’s not them, it’s the corporations, the corporate environment, it’s the total lack of good leadership in our world today that is making them feel the way they do. … It’s the company’s responsibility.”

(direct link to quote)

#Simon Sinek #video #millenials

In human-centric companies, how CEOs and leaders organize is as important as how Henry Ford innovated in factories

Steven Sinofsky

#org structure #quote #Steven Sinofsky

(via What is Organization Design? | Kates Kesler - YouTube)

A useful animated whiteboard video on the components and process of organizational design.

#Kates Kesler #organizational design #video #Galbraith Star Model #Five Milestone Design Process

How do you get people to agree on a thing? Have an open agreement vs a policy. The difference between rules and agreements. Via August.

Group Sticky Notes from the first meeting.

IGI Partners have a comic book version of the theory of Holacracy. It’s a great way to quickly get a sense of what Holacracy is all about.

#holacracy

Kickoff Meeting & iQmetrix Intro to Holacracy

Come join us at our first meetup on Tuesday, November 29th at 5:30pm.

If you’re a team lead, part of a People & Culture team, or an executive who wants to grow a great organization, come join us.

#iqmetrix #holacracy #meetup #Jerome Valdez

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