In one of my previous posts I mentioned the 4 principles that are guiding our XOIT implementation, and the first one is: changing how we are operating and are organized, but not what we are doing. Over the past week we started assigning people to roles with one simple rule: Assign people to roles that are the same as what they are doing today. We don’t necessarily need to fill all roles, we just need to fill roles that people are performing today (during this exercise we found that using sticky notes helped a lot). This is very beneficial if you want to make sure that your assignment of people to roles is balanced. This exercise looked like this (when I began writing this blog post):

Another finding for me was a gap between how we can map our groups leaders into our company HR grades. It feels that XOIT due to the clear roles, domains and accountabilities require a much more clear definition of leadership. This will be a crucial need if you are moving your group to a self-managed operation, while the rest of your company stays within a classical hierarchical structure. In this scenario you need to map your “structure” to your organization grades, which is not an easy task. Thanks to our current management (or rather leadership) team, we managed to come with definitions that helps us to map our HR grades to XOIT.

Our leadership also spent time running current scenarios through the new XOIT processes. After running approximately 20 different scenarios, so far our XOIT processes not only accommodated our needs, but in most cases it was evident that the new processes are more efficient than our current IT processes. The team has now started to feel confident with XOIT, and we are now inviting associates to run their processes through, fine tuning XOIT even more.