Designing effective organizations
The competitiveness of an engineering company in today's marketplace depends as much on its organizational structure and style as on its technical capability. Indeed, the latter flows from the former. The modern organization must be lean, responsive, flexible and make maximum effective use of its engineers. Many heads of technical functions have experience only of traditional functional organizational structures, and have little knowledge of how to design for organizational effectiveness in terms of speed of response, reduced lead times, and total quality performance. Often organizational change in response to competitive pressures is done in an unsystematic and ad hoc way, with consequentially poor results. Whilst an organization cannot be designed with decimal point precision, studies of organizational innovation and systems engineering show that a set of methodologies exists to help a top management team to improve the organizational structure of their company in a positive, step by step and systematic way. Such an approach is an integral part of a Total Quality program aimed at achieving high quality of performance of every part of the organization.