A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
I was visiting a client over the course of a 12-18-month period for some agile coaching when I discovered an interesting pattern. It seemed as if every quarter (3-4 months) or so they would reorganize their organization. Sometimes it was an overhaul reorg, with a massive shift for most folks. And other times, it was just a fine-tuning reorg, affecting only a small percentage. But on aggregate, it seemed as if everyone would get a “new boss” at least once a year.
Of course, there were different reasons for each reorg. Here are some of the drivers that were mentioned in passing—
We need to shift from a Project-based organization to more of a Product-based one.
We lack accountability and ownership within our teams. We’re going to shift management around and declare a “Team Lead” for each team.
We’re adopting LeSS (or Spotify, or fill in your agile scaling framework), which recommends flattening management layers within the organization.
We just merged with/we acquired by (Company x) and we need to aggregate our two groups into one unified team.
We’re simply not getting enough done. We wonder if a reorg will help? Shaking things up a bit if you will.
Now that we’ve “gone Agile” we have far too many of this “role” and need to flatten things out a bit.
We’re not happy with the results from the last reorg. Things are still not getting done and we want to further streamline the organization.
Change happens. Shift happens. So, get over it.
All of which gives you a flavor for the very typical rationale for reorgs that I’ve seen across my 20 years of coaching experience.