Organization

Roles

Definition

• A role is a distinct collection of responsibilities
• A role usually includes some authority in order to fulfill those responsibilities
• A role can sometimes include honor and respect
• Every entity, be it an individual or a group, can have one or more roles

Motivation

• Roles are essential for collaboration
• Roles set expectations between collaborators
• When roles are formalized, people can know what to expect from others before they even meet
• Poorly defined roles results in confusion and inefficiency
• Roles act as interfaces, where the holder a role acts as an implementer of that roles
  • This abstraction allows for smoother exchange and reassignment of roles

Departments

Definition

• Personnel within an organization are grouped together into departments
• Departments are partitioned by domain, with each department representing a particular domain

Unity

• It is easy for departments to become islands that are overly disconnected from the other departments
• Organizations large enough to have multiple departments need operations personnel to bridge the gap between departments

Channels

Production Pipelines

• Production is a pipeline
• The departments and individuals of a production pipeline form a cyclic dependency graph
• The start up the pipeline is "upstream"
• The end of the pipeline is "downstream"

Deliverables

• Most collaboration can be defined in terms of deliverables
• Deliverables are passed along the pipeline from dependencies to dependents
• Examples:
  • UI Designers deliver UI designs to developers
  • Developers deliver partially tested code to QA testers
  • QA testers delivers more comprehensively tested code to distributors
• The production dependency graph is cyclic at both micro levels and macro levels
  • It is cyclic at a micro level because various steps in the process have tight loops
    • For example, while part of the pipeline is roughly Dev => QA => Dist, when QA finds any bugs, it will pass bug tickets back to the developers
  • It is cyclic at the macro level because once a product is finished it is passed back up the pipeline and delivered to customers and clients by upstream personnel
    • In some cases it is only a partially upstream delivery, where upstream personnel are notifying customers of new software updates

Routing by Role

• Much of collaboration consists of routing concerns
• Roles streamline concern-routing by making it obvious to whom and through whom a concern should be routed

Problem Flow

• Most particular problems flow downward, not upward
• Upstream problems can cripple downstream productivity