Working Smarter : Org Charts

How Org Charts Will Help All Departments in Your Business

Rich — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:22:00 GMT

In most organizations, org charts are used for a single purpose – to give new employees a visual representation of the company’s hierarchy. Beyond that, most companies don’t utilize the power of org charts for much else.

Most companies view org charts for simply that purpose and that purpose only. But did you know that you can use org charts to improve virtually every area of your organization? Using org charts can lead to sales proposals closing more quickly, marketing initiatives producing augmented results, and the enhancement of the overall business intelligence and management of the company.

Here are three org chart tactics that will help you improve your organization’s productivity.

Using Org Charts in the Sales Department

Sales people are in a constant state of flux. Data turns to leads, leads to opportunities, opportunities to deals. Along the way sales teams and agents are collecting additional data to help close the sale. Although every prospect has different needs that the sales agent must attend to, the sales agent’s most important piece of information is to know who the decision makers are within the organization. An org chart is a simple way of tracking that information for better, smarter results.

During the sales qualification process any sales person involved should create and update an org chart for a visual representation of the customer’s organization in order to better understand who needs to be persuaded in order for the sale to actually go through. By building an org chart with this information on it the agent now becomes better equipped to find and contact the appropriate person for decision making and future return sales opportunities.

Org charts also have the added benefit of being able to help sales people rapidly communicate all of the information they’ve gathered during the communication process to each other should multiple sales people need to be involved. An org chart should be part of every client file you open.

For example, say you are a sales agent for a company that sells web analytics tools to track web traffic on websites. Your primary client relationships that you forge within various organizations would be the Marketing Director. But if the Marketing Director, Bill Jones, of one of your biggest clients named ABC Company leaves, will your relationship with the company remain intact? You may find that transitioning the client relationship to the next Marketing Director might be far less turbulent if you have an org chart of the entire marketing department and have developed relationships with some people on the team. In fact, one of those people may be the eventual person who assumes the role now left vacant (see below).

Using Org Charts in the Marketing Department

The marketing department of your organization should employ a similar tactic as the sales department using org charts to track the hierarchy and organizational structure of clients. Marketing departments are constantly challenged with communicating the benefits of the company’s products and services in order to create a pipeline of leads and opportunities for the sales department.

One of the ways to achieve this is to look for additional opportunities among your existing pool of clients. So, why not create a clear picture of your clients’ organizational structure by creating org charts to identify other cross-selling and undeveloped relationship opportunities?

Again, these client org charts provide terrific business intelligence to understanding your clients more thoroughly, how each one functions, what roles the individuals play, and, what opportunities have yet to be realized.

For example, say you are an intellectual property attorney at a large full service law firm and one of your clients is a new video game maker. Currently, as the attorney for the company you are the only one that serves their legal needs, but your firm marketing director creates an org chart (below) and together you realize that the company has grown in size in a short period of time and may have some employment and labor law needs like employee handbooks and policies that your firm could handle on their behalf. Because of the org chart, you now have a possible cross-selling opportunity to pitch and potentially have a larger scale client than previously though.

Click to see a larger version of this image.

Using Org Charts in Executive Management

As previously mentioned, org charts provide a unique source of business intelligence which is the crux of the decision making process for members of the executive management team in a company. While the sales and marketing teams are tracking prospects and clients with org charts, the executive management team can plan organizational change of the business with org charts.

This is expanded in greater detail in two previous Working Smarter articles entitled “Playing ‘What If?’ with Your Organization” and “What Do You Do When There Are Not Enough People to Get the Work Done”. The executive management team of a company benefits from knowing the hierarchical structure of the business and the functional relationship with each member. Org charts allow them to look into how lean the organization is or not, and how to plan for growth. Bloated departments may be trimmed, and other departments that may be under realized can be bulked up for the betterment of the organization.

In summary, if you begin using org charts for more than the hierarchy of your own company, your business will augment the overall intelligence regarding prospects, clients, competitors and strategic partners.

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The Synergy between Process and Roles in Your Organization

Rich — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:48:00 GMT

You may know your coworkers' place in the organization, but where do they fit in a process? How has disorganization and proper role comprehension disrupted your business?

As a manager, you know in theory and within your own mind how a particular project should move forward. And you know how each person on your team plays a part in that process leading to the final completion of the project. But, are you communicating both of those items clearly to your team?

Be honest. How organized is your team? How organized are your projects?

Most of the time, when an employee begins at a new company, or begins a new role within a company, that person is handed an organizational chart illustrating who each person in the company reports to. And most of the time the explanation of how this new person is to contribute to a particular process is never mentioned. The manager simply assumes that the new person already knows, or that the new person will ask the appropriate questions for clarity when the need comes up. Beyond that, roles and process are seldom revisited in conversation. And they should be part of your daily conversation with your team.

Each role filled by a member of your team contributes in varying ways to multiple projects and tasks. So, why are these conversations not taking place? And if they are, how can you clearly communicate to each member of your team their role and the relationship it has to each project?

Let’s answer a question with a question - Why not return to the tools you already have (or should have) at your disposal for the solution? Here’s an example:

Ok, so you are a Marketing Director, and you are developing a new campaign for your product line due to the changing of the economic conditions. Since there have been so many changes to your department recently, you decide to create an updated org chart and present it at the next department meeting.

This visual obviously works well in identifying the roles people will play in producing the deliverables for the new campaign; however you want to be clear that everyone understands the proper process the campaign needs to go through so you create a process map and walk through it with your team.

Click here to see a larger version of this image.

The process above illustrates the general procedure of the creation of the new campaign, and the initials in the boxes along with the color coding indicate the team member(s) responsible for the associated task; ultimately leading each person to a better understanding of how the building of the new campaign work is to flow from start to finish.

What you are able to do now is communicate to your team the role they play in the organization, and how that role fits into this particular project process of creating a new campaign.

From our example you can see that Jeremy Yates is responsible for beginning the drafting of the campaign message following the presentation of the research given by Thomas and Carlos, and then submit to Jan for proofing and editing (see below).

You don’t have to necessarily recreate the wheel in order to have better understanding of roles and functions from the people you work with. You simply need to focus on how to better communicate with your team on how each is an important participant to the team and the process by revisiting the subject on an ongoing basis.

What you will find is that your processes will improve, your projects and tasks become more organized and your people work smarter.

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Playing “What If?” with Your Organization

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:41:00 GMT

Here’s a scenario: you’re a manager of a marketing communications department with ten employees, and you’ve just been given the word from upstairs that you need to cut $200,000 out of your payroll by the end of the week. What do you do?

Any manager will tell you that cutting payroll is among the least pleasant duties required of management, but it’s a necessary evil. When any manager is given an order to cut his or her payroll, he or she must consider three major items:

Which team members generate the least return per dollar spent on payroll;
Which members of the organization will fill the roles vacated by terminated employees;
And how the team as a whole will be able to maintain their output, despite the loss of personnel.

We’ve discussed a number of options for doing more with less recently on the blog, but today we want to focus specifically on the first two items: determining who to cut and how to replace them without new hires.

Considering Different “What If?” Scenarios

Consider an organization chart of your team or department as it is currently:

You have ten people in your department, including yourself. You need to eliminate $200,000 worth of payroll without adversely affecting output—how do you do it? Well, before you begin considering individual performance, you first need to list all of the payroll information on your org chart, like this:

Having the exact payroll numbers on the org chart makes it easier for us to see just how far any of our possible personnel changes brings us to our goal of a $200,000 payroll cut. Given that we have all of the information, it’s time for us to play a little “what if?” with our org chart.

First we have to determine who our key employees are – who are the people on my team who are so productive or knowledgeable that we would simply be unable recoup the loss of output if they left?

In this scenario, we have three people who are truly “key employees.” First, there’s David, who has been with the company for many years and understands every aspect of the company’s marketing, inside-and-out—he knows how to communicate that through all of his artwork. Not only does David produce great work, but he produces a lot of it and has received incremental raises over the past three years.

George is another keeper—although he’s new to the team, his contributions make all of the MarCom webpages more interactive and memorable for every potential customer who visits them; the quality of the average user experience would diminish significantly without George’s work. Not only is George proficient at a technical level, but he’s also a self-starter and actively improves the customer experience throughout the website without having to be told to do so. Replacing him would be excruciatingly difficult.

The last person that we’re not going to consider in our payroll cut is Joanne; she is able to convert the production team’s work into web pages more quickly, efficiently and accurately than anyone else. And she is the only person on the team who understands how every detail of the website can affect the user experience. It’s largely due to her ability to anticipate the behavior of potential customers which has made your company’s websites so successful.

Every other position on this flowchart is fair game for elimination.

Scenario 1 – Eliminating the Most Expensive Employees

You have two managers who report to you: Tom and Janice, who are paid $100,000 each and manage four people a piece. They were both promoted to managers a year ago and neither one of them has performed spectacularly. Tom’s team is productive but they don’t consistently produce high-quality marketing materials unless David does most of it, and Tom has been slow to correct the problems.

Janice is another story—she is always on the offensive and is the first person to blame someone else when something goes wrong. She’s disrespectful to Tom and his team and spends more time defending her own team’s errors than she does correcting them. Her transition from development to management has been difficult and it’s clear that she’s not cut out for it.

The rationale here is that under this scenario you only have to cut two employees, so the size of your workforce will not be as small as it would be had you cut three or four lower-level people.

If you eliminated both of these employees, you would meet your goal of cutting $200,000 out of payroll. Here’s what your org chart would look like:

Payroll cut so far: $100,000 (goal: $200,000)

I went ahead and flipped the org chart onto its side (you can do that automatically in SmartDraw) to make it easier to read on this blog, but the important thing to note is how your number of direct reports has increased four-fold since you eliminated Tom and Janice. Instead of having two mid-level managers reporting to you, you now have eight employees who report directly to you. This means that your personal workload is going to increase significantly and all of the employees will receive less supervision overall.

Given the quality control issues that both teams have been having, less management will mean less review of work and probably more errors. Clearly, eliminating just the highest paid positions isn’t a good solution.

Scenario 2 – Eliminating the Poorest Performers

Rather than merely eliminate the two most expensive positions from the payroll and calling it a day, we will consider the performance of every employee and cut those who produce the least amount of value relative to their compensation. We’ve already determined that David, George, and Joanne are well-worth what they are paid and we’ve determined that Janice is a drain on morale and actually hinders the productivity of both teams. Janice’s position will be eliminated.

Given that information, here is what our flowchart will look like:

Payroll cut so far: $100,000 (goal: $200,000)

Your number of direct reports has increased from two to five, but you’ve eliminated a problem employee and saved $100,000 worth of payroll per year. Your personal workload is going to increase somewhat and you’re going to have to spend some more time attending to the day-to-day activities of Janice’s team. You’re confident that you can pick up the slack.

We’re going to keep Tom for now—he’s not a spectacular manager, but he’s been learning as he goes and has shown signs of improvement; so long as Tom keeps learning how to become a better manager, he’ll be increasingly valuable.

Let’s consider your other direct reports. George and Joanne are all-stars and they don’t need to be looked after; Shauna isn’t outstanding but she works well with George and Joanne. Michael, on the other hand, is error-prone and a poor producer; it’s clear, based on the quality and volume of Michael’s work, that he does not care. Your company can do without him.

Joanne has already been tidying up after Michael, so eliminating Michael doesn’t adversely impact your output much. In addition, most of your time spent managing your new reports would probably be spent managing Michael, so eliminating him frees you up somewhat.

Payroll cut so far: $165,000 (goal: $200,000)

In order to make our goal, we only have to eliminate one more employee; everyone else from Janice’s team will remain intact, so we’ll have to look at Tom’s team. We know for certain that we’re keeping David, given his excellence; Robert and Cheryl are both decent producers, even though Cheryl occasionally gets the technical details of our products wrong and Robert’s copy is sometimes off; this leaves Basil.

Basil’s work is high quality, but he is slow to adapt to changes in the marketing plan and has bungled the past few major assignments that have been handed to him. He is a drain on management’s resources and his mistakes, although infrequent, have been costly. David can probably pick up some of Basil’s work and Tom himself is a decent graphic artist, so the two can split Basil’s workload reasonably well.

Let’s see how this would look on our org chart:

Payroll cut so far: $225,000 (goal: $200,000)

Your number of direct reports is down to four instead of five and Tom’s management workload has decreased somewhat. Basil’s loss in productivity will be hard to replace, but Tom and David are going to do their best to maintain the same level of output.

You get the idea—you can use an org chart as a modeling tool to determine how many direct reports are going to fall onto your plate and you can use it to see how eliminating positions will affect your overall payroll numbers. It doesn’t take long to play “what if?” using this technique. And for more complicated management scenarios, like ones where you have to change the roles and positions of employees, this method really helps paint a clearer picture of how your organization will be affected by your personnel changes.

Next time we’ll cover the third bullet: how to get the job done, even if you don’t think you have enough people to do it.

Want to play “what if?” with your own organization? Download a free trial of SmartDraw and make your own org charts!

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Four Ways to Make Your Org Charts More Useful

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:15:00 GMT

Using my own job as SmartDraw’s Community Outreach Manager as an example, this is what I would normally be given as soon as I joined the organization:

This is a pretty basic organization chart—it shows whom I report to, along with a few other tidbits about other related aspects of the organization. This isn’t SmartDraw’s full org chart, but it makes my point clear. This org chart tells me whom I report to and little else. Org charts are capable of so much more than this, and I will explain how to get more mileage out of them in this article.

We’ve been talking a lot about human resource issues, such as the need for developing concrete roles. And it’s only natural that we talk about some of the tools for putting those HR practices into place—org charts being one such tool.

The premise here is that org charts are not only a blueprint for your organization’s growth. They are also helpful instruments for the purposes of training and the institutionalization of knowledge. Thus, here are four ways to make your org charts more useful:

1. Link to Job Descriptions for Each Role

Provide links to the job descriptions associated with each role—this is the best thing you can do to make your org charts more valuable. Remember that annoying organization / communication gap left by “traditional” org charts? Well, linking to the job descriptions of all of the roles listed on your org chart is the best way to fill it!

So if I’m a brand new Community Outreach Manager and I’m handed an org chart with links to everyone else’s job descriptions, I can quickly figure out that I need to talk to the webmaster in order to have those handy email bulletins built and distributed. And ask a plethora of questions regarding which roles the “Community Outreach Manager” role depends upon.

I don’t know much about being able to use hyperlinks in other org charting programs. But I know that SmartDraw’s supported this capability for quite a few years now.

2. Put a Face and Name to Each Role

Here’s a familiar example from the SmartDraw Org Chart library:

I know why most companies don’t include names or photos on their org charts: they don’t want to take the time to update them whenever personnel change. That’s a poor excuse. Think of it this way: you can save your employees a lot of trouble by putting a name and face to every role in the organization. This is especially true for new employees, who know little (if anything) about your organization when they first report for work.

3. Leave Workgroups and Teams off the Organization Chart

You should define an org chart hierarchically, by who reports to whom. Every person on the org chart should report directly to the person who sets his or her salary. Every organization has teams and workgroups, which are groups of individuals assigned to handle activities specific to a project but not the organization as a whole.

Let me make this clear—don’t mark up your organization chart with dotted lines and line hops because you want to include all of the workgroup/team relationships within your organization. That stuff doesn’t pertain to the structure of the organization and it belongs on its own team chart instead.

4. Organize Your Direct Reports Vertically on the Org Chart [Aesthetic Tip]

Many people are tempted to draw their org charts with all of their direct reports organized in a horizontal fashion. This is not only wasteful, but it’s hard to read—instead, organize your direct reports in a vertical fashion, like this:

Click here for a full-sized version of this org chart.

Initially, you start with the CEO at the top of the org chart and have one horizontal layer of management. Beneath each manager should be a vertical list of all of his or her direct reports—not a horizontal one. This makes it easier to put your entire organization onto a single page, which it makes it easier to distribute your org chart as a printed handout to employees.

If you follow these four tips, you’ll have org charts that contain more information, look better, and take up less space. If you’d like to try some of these tips yourself, please download a free trial of SmartDraw and have a go at it.

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The Organization / Communication Gap

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:22:00 GMT

In my previous article on why businesses need roles, I mentioned that you use roles primarily as an HR tool. Specifically, I said:

This is the human resources half of roles—roles are a means to apportion and assign responsibility for different parts of an organization’s operations. Roles are formally declared in a job description and published in an organization chart in order to allow everyone in an organization to know who is responsible for what.

The “job description” capacity of roles is taken for granted by most managers: roles are used to give employees an encapsulated bubble of responsibility within the organization—and that’s it. Roles are traditionally defined as a tiny bubble, containing nothing but the relationship between the manager and the employee, and the canvas of activities required to complete the said work.

But that’s where most employers and managers stop—they stop defining the role and the manager-employee relationship at the level as it applies directly to the employee and the manager. What’s missing here?

The Organization / Communication Gap

What’s missing is everything outside of the manager/employee reporting structure. The role defines the relationship between the manager and the employee, but that’s it. The traditional org chart and job description does nothing to describe the roles of other people in the organization.

Most employees have to discover the responsibilities of other employees on a need-to-know basis. You don’t know whose job it is to fix your workstation until it breaks; you don’t know who to ask for stock art until you’re asked to make a newsletter; you don’t know who manages the website updates until you have to get a page modified; and so forth.

This is the organization / communication gap: managers drop the ball and leave almost all of the meaningful information about the organization’s other employees as it pertains to an employee’s specific role out of the conversation.

New hires are reduced to wandering around the office, looking for the person who’s supposed to help them. Every time a new employee has to teach themselves a lesson in your own company’s hierarchy, you lose productive person-hours; even worse, if the lesson they teach themselves is wrong, you can lose sales, data and uptime.

The Simple Lesson

The lesson is simple: publish the roles and responsibilities of everyone in your organization in a centralized knowledge system. Rather than have new hires wander around the office pestering other employees for answers, have them get the information straight from a current, central knowledge source. For smaller organizations, have a simple org chart with every role, the names of the people who fill those roles, and corresponding job descriptions for those roles.

In our next article, I intend to show you an example of how you can make more informative organizational charts which provide all of the information needed to plug the Organization / Communication gap.

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Org Charts: The Blueprint for Your Organization's Growth

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:39:00 GMT

As Paul pointed out in his article, “Why the Organization Chart is Not Obsolete,” the real purpose of org charts—the most common method for expressing roles—is to build a blueprint for your organization’s future growth.

Using SmartDraw.com itself as an example, here is what our organization chart looked like back in 1994, when Paul founded the company:

Paul was the lone employee, responsible for:

Product Development
Marketing
Sales
Finance
Customer Support
Operations
IT
Vision and its implementation (CEO stuff)

Here’s what his org chart would look like if we annotated it with the names of all employees filling those roles:

So what’s the point of having an org chart with Paul’s name on it, in nine different places?

The point is that Paul used an org chart like the one pictured above to lay out how he wanted to expand his human resources as his organization grew—the first person he hired was someone to help fulfill the roles of CFO and the Shipping Manager. Specifically, Paul needed someone to process and ship incoming orders. Here’s what our org chart looked like after Bob Jones, the new hire, was added to SmartDraw’s organization:

You can see where I’m going with this—the next person that Paul hired was someone to manage the website (CIO) and to answer incoming support phone calls. So we added Carl Stevens to the org chart.

Think of your org chart as a skeleton for your organization—it defines your organization’s human resource structure based upon your activities and needs. This is exactly what we have done as we’ve grown from a one-man show to a larger organization.

The Steps

So how do you do it? How do you start with a blank org chart and eventually turn it into a guide for making hiring decisions? Here’s a broad way of doing it:

Write down your organization’s current needs. What COGS do you need in order to get the wheels of your organization to turn tomorrow?
Consider your organization’s future needs. What COGS do you need in order to get the wheels of your organization to turn in five years? Back in 1994, SmartDraw did not need a VP of Engineering as all of the development was in the hands of one employee. However, as SmartDraw’s customer base grew and its needs changed, SmartDraw eventually hired a full-time person to manage the development of our software. The role was on the org chart for a long time though, before we hired someone to tackle the VP of Engineering responsibilities!
Define roles responsible for satisfying those needs. That’s what a role is—a responsibility to fulfill a business need. Encapsulate a number of related needs under a single role and define your roles using written job descriptions.
Organize your roles into a reporting structure using an org chart. As soon as your organization expands beyond one person, you’re going to have to establish a reporting structure. The employees who fulfill the roles you’ve defined have to be held accountable by someone—and a reporting structure is a simple, formal means of expressing that accountability.
Prioritize your hires according to the magnitude of your needs. Paul hired a shipping manager / CFO within a few months of selling the first copy of SmartDraw because the sales volume increased to a point where Paul was spending too much of his own time filling orders; ditto for answering customer service calls and maintaining the website. So he made those two hires first because the needs were greatest in those areas of SmartDraw’s organization. Do the same for your own business: determine which needs are the most pressing and make hires to fill out the roles that satisfy those needs first.
Adjust your roles and your org chart as your needs change. An org chart is not an inflexible definition of your organization’s structure, folks—it should be treated as an organic document that evolves in accordance with your organization’s changing needs. Update it accordingly.

This six-step process is simple, straightforward and suitable for most small organizations. Really, all this process does is help you transform your business needs into actionable hires; however, there are a multitude of other nuances to take into account, such as how to group appropriate responsibilities into roles. This process won’t help you answer all of those questions, but if you’re starting with an entirely clean slate, this process will be enough to get you started. And it will help you layout a blueprint for your organization’s growth plan.

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Why Businesses Need Roles

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:29:00 GMT

In the course of our conversation about growing a business without growing pains, I’ve raised two central topics: processes and roles. I’ve already beaten all of you over the head with article after article on processes so far this month, but if you want a refresher please read “Why Businesses Need Processes.”

I have not talked about the purpose of roles in much detail thus far, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

The Need for Roles

Let me put a hypothetical question out there as a preface:

“If my business consists of only myself, do I still need roles in my organization?”

The answer: every organization that intends to grow needs roles. If you do not plan to grow your business beyond being a one-person organization, then you probably do not need roles; however, if you have any intention of growing your business, then roles are a must.

The Dual Purpose of Roles

Most people think of “roles” as job descriptions and responsibilities. This is the human resources half of roles—roles are a means to apportion and assign responsibility for different parts of an organization’s operations. Roles are formally declared in a job description and published in an organization chart in order to allow everyone in an organization to know who is responsible for what.

This capacity of roles (and org charts) is so well understood that the point is almost taken for granted; most employers dutifully roll out job descriptions and update them as job functions evolve. Employers who don’t have a formal method for defining their employees' job functions do not last long.

The second purpose of roles—the one that is less understood—is that roles are a blueprint for the expansion of human resources within your organization. This is why the one-man organization needs roles: because properly defined roles help those employers make better decisions about whom to hire and what sort of candidates to look for.

Over the next two weeks, we’re going to take a closer look at roles and some of the best practices for implementing them. Feel free to leave comments!

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Four Techniques I Use to be a Better Manager

Paul — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:00:00 GMT

When I founded SmartDraw.com I was a software developer not a manager. Not that this mattered much because the only person I needed to manage at the time was me!

As the company grew, management was "thrust upon me", and I learned four techniques I still use to manage people and projects effectively.

1. I Organize my Thoughts with a Mind Map

I'm a visual thinker (as you might imagine) and I use a mind map at the start of any new project I am working on to organize my thoughts and ideas.

A mind map is a visual outline. Using SmartDraw of course, I just dump out my ideas onto the page and then re-arrange them into logical groups. I use SmartDraw's keyboard shortcuts and automatic formatting I find this even easier to do than using Word to make a traditional text outline. Here's an example of one of my mind maps.

Watch my screen cast on drawing mind maps with SmartDraw too.

2. I Organize my People with Organization Charts and Team Charts

There are two ways we are organized at SmartDraw: into a traditional reporting hierarchy and into teams for specific projects. I use the traditional top-down org chart for the former and a team chart for the latter.

Your company organization chart is actually a device for showing positions and their responsibilities rather than people. Sometimes in a small company one person may be the "incumbent" for more than one position. I have written about this in a previous post.

A team chart is an effective way of making sure everyone working on a project knows what part of it they, and the other members of the team, are responsible for and what's expected of them. Just because it's clear in your mind doesn't mean it's clear in the rest of the team members' minds.

Watch my accompanying screencast "How to Draw Organizational Charts and Team Charts with SmartDraw."

3. I Organize my Operations with Processes

As my business grew it soon became evident that we needed to formally define the way we did routine things so that the result was the same each time and we could train new people more easily. Whether it was something technical, like the way we built software releases, or something simple like the way we shipped product, we needed to define a process that was followed each time.

I use flowcharts to define our processes. With SmartDraw 2008 that we released in September, this is so easy I can actually revise the chart on the fly as I think it through.

Watch me do this in my screencast "How to Map Your Business Processes with SmartDraw."

4. I Organize my Work with a Project Chart

In my experience the biggest reason projects are completed late (and over budget) is because all of the steps involved were not considered up front. Managers specify tasks that are big and vague like "Create Website". A big task like this is actually made up of many small tasks and can take months. You cannot properly estimate how long a task like "create website" is actually going to take without breaking it down into smaller more specific tasks.

My rule is that if any task takes more than three days it's too broad and needs to be broken down into smaller tasks. As I go through this process I always think of new things that I need to do and that add time to my initial estimate. Something that sounds simple is often not so, once you get down to the nitty-gritty.

I use a mind map to start the process of identifying all of the tasks. I break big tasks into smaller tasks. The natural outline format of a mind map is perfect for this. Then I convert my mind map into the traditional project chart (or Gantt chart) format an assign a time to complete each one. SmartDraw makes this particularly easy because it does it automatically and lets me go back and forth between the two views with a single mouse click.

Watch my screencast, "Managing Projects with SmartDraw" to see this in action.

All of these techniques help me keep multiple projects on-track, and the people working on them informed and on the same page. For more details read the companion PDF from our Working Smarter series: Four Ways to be a Better Manager.

Why the Organization Chart is Not Obsolete

Paul — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:00:00 GMT

It's fashionable to view the traditional top-down org chart as about as relevant to today's growing businesses as the three-piece suit. Today we self-organize into ad-hoc teams that form and melt away again, or so the theory goes.

As someone who has built a business from one person to 40 (and growing fast) I think most entrepreneurs misunderstand org charts and their value even to the smallest business of just one person. Yes, I'm serious: A one person organization that aims to grow needs an org chart!

The root of all this is the common misconception that org charts show how your people are organized. Wrong! An org chart shows how the responsibilities in your organization are organized even if there is just one of you.

When I started SmartDraw I was the lone employee, responsible for

Product Development
Marketing
Sales
Finance
Customer Support
Operations
IT
Vision and its implementation (CEO stuff)

But my org chart looked like this:

Note that there are no people associated with this chart. It shows the organization of the positions (with their implied responsibilities) within the company and is still valid today. Back then when I added the occupant of these positions it would have looked like this:

A bit silly, you say? No, it shows the road map for me to grow my business. Part of my job has been to replace myself in each of these roles as SmartDraw has grown. Today the chart looks similar but most of these boxes have someone else's name as the occupant.

An org chart is an incredibly useful tool that forces you to think about the way your business should to be organized and points the direction to get there.

Let me walk you through the way I use the org chart as a management and planning tool and what I get out of it.

1. Start by defining the positions (jobs) in your company

Before you can draw an org chart you must define the positions within your company and their responsibilities. My favorite way to do this is with a job description: A short document that defines a job or position within the company. I structure them like this:

Title of the position
The goal of the position
The measure of success
List of responsibilities

Here's an example:

Director of Product Engineering and Services

Goal

The goal of this position is to ensure that SmartDraw releases occur on time, meet specifications and are of high quality and that customer support of the product is appreciated by our customers.

The Measure of Success

One year from now, the successful occupant of this position will have achieved the following:

The successful release of SmartDraw 2008 in early September 2007.

Developed and validated the authority and a quality of all content (templates and symbols).

Specific Responsibilities

MANAGE DEVELOPMENT
INSTALLS
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
QUALITY ASSURANCE
CUSTOMER SUPPORT

2. Decide who reports to whom

Except for the CEO, each of these positions reports to one other. Ah ha! You say. This is not true in my organization we all talk to each other; Marianne for example does work for three different people. OK, but who sets her salary? Who hired her? Who will hire her replacement? That's who she reports to.

If you still can't answer this question, (perhaps you have equal co-managers or co-ceos), it's your organization that the problem, not the nature of org charts. Someone has to call the shots. If you can't make up your mind who this is, it's time you did.

3. Now draw your chart

Now you have a simple hierarchy and you can draw that org chart.

Lessons Learned

The most important step in this process is defining each position and its job description. This forces you to think about every step in your business and how it is organized. Write job descriptions as if you have no employees. Don't write one to fit what someone you have already does. If Marianne is tech support rep and shipping manager, don't write a joint job description. Write two and put her in as the current occupant of both. This gives you a much clearer picture of her role.

Once it is complete, show it to everyone. Ambiguity is removed. Clarity reigns!

Teams

OK, great but we all work in teams that don't follow the org chart, you say. So do we, but that has nothing to do with our org chart. Project teams live in a parallel universe to the org chart. Don't try to mix them up. Use your org chart to map out responsibilities and roles within the organization. Use a team chart to map out the responsibilities within a project. We cover this in another post.

Learn More About Creating & Drawing Organizational Charts

If you'd like to see how easy it is to map your business' roles and positions into an organizational structure then watch our screencast "How to Draw Organizational Charts and Team Charts with SmartDraw."