How to avoid functional managers?

While working on a network organisation concept and principles:

  • Value and speed vs cost and efficiency
  • Adaptiveness
  • Transparency

and giving it a try to visualise it in this document. (feel free to provide your comments)

I stumbled across the challenge which is not obvious how to solve in the best way. And whole principle of network structure can be broken if certain culture is strong in a company. The challenge i am talking about is excellence of functional skills e.g. quality, product management, development practices, analysts

We are trying to solve it introducing following activities:

  • Internal unconferences with following “TODOthon” (copyright by Dainius)
  • Internal communities: meetups and knowledge sharing sessions
  • Education center with leads per topic
  • POD Leads and Keepers decide if and how people should participate or lead certain communities

Some open questions:

  • Who sets the bar? Understanding what is best can differ from POD to POD
  • How to split time? When you don’t participate in daily work you loose competency and can’t contribute well to community

How do you keep excellence across the company? Not interested in solutions with functional managers

p.s. was surprised that **otify has functional managers, so they have cool way of organising projects, but organisational structure i guess is old-fashioned. before that was thinking that they have network structure.