In their seminal book, Structured Design Larry Constantine said that high cohesion (the degree to which the internal contents of a module are related) and loose coupling (the degree to which a module depends upon other modules) were desirable aspects of a well designed programme. I think that these tenets can be taken and applied to the design of organisations and teams.
In an organisation, the equivalent of a module (for my purposes at least) is a team. A team exhibits high cohesion when all of its members are focused on the same business goal, when the communication between team members is fast, accurate and relevant to achieving the goal and when all the resources it needs are either under control of the team or can easily be acquired and accessed by the team.
In an organisational context, coupling is a measure of how teams interact. Team are loosely coupled if the responsibilities of teams are clearly defined and when, on the occasion that a team needs something from another team to achieve its ends, the mechanisms for doing this are clear and well known.
In order for teams to be highly cohesive and loosely coupled they have to be exist in order to achieve a business goal. They have to be made up of people with different skills that when they come together they can achieve something that they could not possibly do separately. A great example of this is a film crew. This consists of a lot of people with specific skills (including technical and organisational skills) that are brought together for a specific task.
The alternative to this is teams that are based on functions rather than business goals. This is the great anti-pattern of matrix management, to which I will return in a future blog.
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