Organizational Alignment

What is “Organizational Alignment”? 

Organizational alignment is similar to a long sailing trip, in which you will need:

1. Destination – Mission and Goals:
   1. Why people should be motivated to perform at a high level?
   2. What will be achieved?
2. Route – Strategy:
   1. How resources should be allocated and decisions made?
   2. What the organization will and won’t do?
3. Boat – Structure: ( Must support strategy)
   1. Defines who has the authority to do what.
   2. The way an organization organizes people and technology to support mission, vision, and strategy
   3. Basic Elements:
      1. Decisions rights and rules
      2. Performance measurements and incentive systems
      3. Units: How direct reports are grouped ( E.g. Function, product, geographical area)
      4. Reporting relationships and integration mechanisms
4. How to outfit – Processes: “Systems” that enable your group to transform information, material, and knowledge into value in the form of commercially viable products, services, new knowledge, ideas, productive relationships, or anything essential.
   Align processes with structure as the human body ( Processes = Physiology | Structure = Anatomy (Skelton,..)) 
   1. Evaluation: (Process analysis stimulates collective learning)
      1. Productivity – Does the process transform knowledge, material, and labor into value?
      2. TimeLines: Delivery of value in a timely manner?
      3. Reliability
      4. Quality: Consistent required value standards
5. Crew Members – Skill Base
   1. Individual Expertise: Training, education, and experience 
   2. Meta-Knowledge: Awareness of where to go to get critical information
   3. Relational-Knowledge: Understanding how to work together to integrate individual knowledge
   4. Embedded-Knowledge: Core technology which performance depends

Inspired from The First 90 Days