Part 3 | Defining Your Hierarchy - Define Your Departments

What is a Department?

Departments represent the physical structure of your organization.? These include things like Accounts Payable, Procurement, Helpdesk, Shipping, and Solution Architecture.? Departments live within Function Areas based on the functions they provide to the larger organization.?

Depending on your organization's maturity level, you will likely find that your department structure closely resembles your physical structure.? The closer they match, the more focused you are on customer deliverables.? However, remember not to start with your company's org. chart.? Create these definitions through interviews and research, then match them up to see how close you are.? It's been my experience that org. charts aren't typically maintained well.

Properties of a Department

• Name – The name of the Department.
• Description – A robust description of the Department's purpose.
• Functional Area - The Functional Area where the Department resides.? A Department can have only one functional area.?
• Core Function(s) - A list of high-level functions that help define the Department's purpose.? At this point, this will be a high-level list of assumptions.? You will update these once you have defined your Teams.? Remember that this is a bottom-up transformation.
• Owner Role - The role of the person who heads the Department as defined by your Human Resources department.? Later you will use roles, and not specific individuals, while completing your analysis.?
• Owner Name - The name of the individual that currently has responsibility for the Department.? This information is only important for getting questions answered and ensuring assumptions are correct.

Multiple Functional Areas

I've encountered issues where a Department fits into multiple Functional Areas.? This is an early indication that your organizational alignment is incorrect.? At this time allow it to happen.? Once you have completed your transformation baseline the proper alignment will reveal itself to you.

Typically you will find that the multiple alignment is incorrect or you will end up splitting the functions in the Department over multiple other Departments while streamlining your operation.

Building Your Hierarchy

As I said earlier, Departments are aligned within the Functional Areas of your hierarchy.? Your hierarchy should look something like this at this point in the process.