Organization

Definition

Organization

a relatively large-scale indirect producer with the following characteristics:

• Endeavor. An organization is a major component of an enterprise.
• Structure. An organization consists of a cohesive collection of one or more related teams.
• Management. An organization is managed as a unit.

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, organizations are part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Abstract
• Superclass: Producer
• Subclasses:
  • Customer Organization
  • Development Organization
  • Maintenance Organization
  • Marketing Organization
  • Operations Organization
  • Partner Organization
  • Reuse Organization
  • Subcontractor Organization
  • Support Organization
  • User Organization
  • Vendor Organization

Responsibilities

The typical responsibilities of an organization are to:

• Collaborate with other organizations to achieve a cohesive set of an enterprise’s business goals, whereby the specific set of goals depends on the individual organization.
• Divide the human resources of a large enterprise into a small number of more focused and manageable organizational units.
• Staff its component teams.
• Allocate its component teams to endeavors.

Guidelines

• Different endeavors require different processes, which in turn will require different organizations.
• Every endeavor does not require every kind of organization.
• Select only those organizations that are appropriate for the endeavor.
• The same physical organization can often play the part of multiple logical organizations, and the same logical organization can be played by multiple physical organizations. Whether one is speaking about a logical or physical organization can usually be determined by context, but the meaning should be made explicit if it is unclear from context.
• Flexibility. The OPF supports flexibility in process engineering because process engineers can tailor and/or extend the organizations that make up a method (a.k.a., process model) in the following ways:
  • Responsibilities. Add, modify, and/or delete their responsibilities.
  • Teams. Add, modify, and/or delete the teams that they are composed of.
  • Work Units. Add, modify, and/or delete the work units that they perform.