Susan Hasty shared an article on LinkedIn by Joost Minnaar, about how to organize a large company without middle management.

Her question to us working with EA was how we will incorporate this in our work.

Initial thinking

As an employee in a 200,000 person company and working with large organisations, I think I have some understanding of the challenges we all have.

I’m from Sweden and we have in general flatter organizations and less hierarchies than other countries.

I will continue to use the film production company as an example, even if its small compared to NBC Universal with 60,000 employees.

Company strategy

As a company, you must have a clear strategy to communicate to your customers, partners and employees.

Our mission statements are continuously improve creativity & better and better stories, together.

The rest of the strategy is described in the Business Model Canvas.

Film production

Business are different and governance models have an impact on how you work with EA in each organization.

A film production is run as a project with a team during a limited time. You need management within the team, but the question is how much management you need above the production level.

In some ways you can compare with software development, in others not.

Key resources

Key resources are the most important resources we need to have in order to deliver our value propositions. There are other resources needed, but these are those we focus on

Crew
Collaboration tools
Sales tools
Production handbooks
Production planning tools
Post-production tools

Nota bene, management is not a key resource, even if it’s a capability in the high-level picture.

Value of management

So what should a mid-level management do in this organization, even if it grows substantially in several countries?

If the teams have skills and authority to make decisions themselves, what kind of decisions do middle management need to take?

My experience of middle management is that lot of their workload comes from resolving issues in and between teams.

Second, routine administrative work that should be automated.

Third, measure a high number of KPI’s for each team member and team it self.

Instead of middle management

First, resolve root-cause of friction in and between the teams. Often due to performance metrics and/or ways of working.

Secondly, automate management work as much as possible and delegate more rights to teams.

Third, think of what kind of KPI’s should they use as each project is run with a separate budget

Impact on architecture

The core architecture method we use doesn’t differ, but values and priorities do.

One of the key resources except crew are the film production handbooks that describes best practices and align work between teams. E.g. remove friction.

Another key resource are collaboration tools to minimize friction in and between teams by enable better communication.

Then we have the tools are used to help the crew with planning, so they can focus their effort on creative tasks instead of firefighting on set.

If EA focus on the infrastructure and platforms that minimize the friction between teams and then automation of management tasks do we have a nice scope for our architecture.

Your comments, thoughts and experiences from less management, please.

Disruptive architecture