Analyzing Your Corporate Workgroups

By definition, a corporate workgroup (or, more precisely, an interfunctional workgroup) is a formal or informal group of managers and/or professionals from different functional units of your company (marketing, sales, finance, operations, etc.) focused on achieving specific objective (the raison d’être for the formation of the group).

It can be optimization of a certain business process, execution of a corporate project, solution of a significant corporate problem, etc. Some workgroups are permanent; however, most are disbanded after they reach their objectives.

Workgroups are an excellent way to make money (specifically, by removing interfunctional barriers), but also an equally efficient way to lose a lot of time, effort and, ultimately, money. Therefore, they must be expertly gathered, analyzed and managed. In short, you will need a solid and highly efficient workgroup management system.

The core of this system is, obviously, highly efficient corporate processes for (1) identifying the raisons d’être for workgroup formation and (2) assembling these groups and commencing their operation. Managed by someone with a serious corporate authority (one of the top managers).

Next, you will need a comprehensive list of all your workgroups; their fundamental objectives and their members. Supported by no less comprehensive database of documents generated by workgroups so far – including progress reports, of course.

Your next step will be to make sure that each workgroup objective is worthwhile in terms of creating sufficient amount of financial and aggregate value to justify the existence of the workgroup in question. Those workgroups that fail this test, must be disbanded right then and there. Without any remorse whatsoever.

For those that do pass this test, you must make sure that each one has the right members with the right competencies, the right corporate authority and the right ‘support from above’ in the corporate food chain. Those that do not, must be either fortified – or disbanded. Again, without remorse.

Then you must make sure that the ‘healthy’ workgroups (in terms of both objectives, membership and support) have the rock-solid plans and the right procedures in place and that they are properly managed from inside and supervised from the outside.