At one time I worked in a "matrix" organization. As a product line quality department manager I reported to the Quality Division director and obtained trained people from his functional departments. He gave me advice and technical direction.

My other boss was the program director who was responsible for the product and also supervised engineering, manufacturing, finance, planning, and several other departments as they worked on his program. He gave me money.

Many people had a problem with being on two charts, with two bosses, even though they had different missions. It didn't bother me because I saw them in different roles and made certain that I kept them informed enough to leave me alone. Communication has to be forced—people will not usually seek it out on their own.

These teams were set up to accomplish a task and then disbanded when the task was complete. Inside the operations special teams would be established to attack a specific problem. They were short-lived and existed only until the problem was resolved completely. This rarely took more than a few weeks. Other groups were brought together for the purpose of communications, such as quality improvement, and they lasted much longer.

It took me a while to learn that just because something is worthwhile, it does not have permission to become fat and inefficient. This was important because it was possible to have meetings going on at all times—there were enough teams about. (I wrote a chapter on this in Quality without Tears, showing that one executive only had a single day in which to work each year.)

In my organization, which contained about 1,000 people, we set up some rules for team meetings of all sorts. First, an agenda had to be published at least a day ahead of time. Second, all meetings had to be held standing up, and to this end we removed all the chairs from our conference rooms. No one believed we did this, and folks came from far away just to watch. But we did, and the meetings were short and effective. The message was that it does not take long for prepared people to discuss a subject, come to a conclusion, and then agree on some action. What takes long is being unstructured and having unlimited time. Those groups we disbanded.

We learned to do as much work as possible within the organization as it was set up, without adding any other blocks anywhere.

© Copyright 1999 Philip Crosby Associates II, Inc. All rights reserved.

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