From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
I was in your Time Span workshop last week. Fascinating. Where do we start? What are the first moves that we make?

Response:
The first moves are always with yourself. Elliott’s intention was that Requisite Organization be a comprehensive organization-wide managerial system. And the first moves are always with yourself.

Organize Around the Work
Define the roles that are necessary. The first missteps an organization makes, is to focus on the capability of their people. Before you examine that capability, you must know what capability is necessary in the roles. It’s like MBWA. Before you do all that walking around, it would be a good idea to know what you are looking for.

Defining roles is fundamental managerial work that most would like to skip, and that is where it starts. What is the work that is necessary?

Only after you have defined the market need and determined a viable product or service, where there is enough value that the customer is willing to pay for, that we can profitably produce, with enough volume to create an organization, we can begin.

Organize Around the Work
What is the work that is necessary? What is the direct output of our production teams that creates the product or service that our customer experiences?

Organize Around the Work
With our production teams, how do we maintain the pace of that production to meet market requirements (sales orders)? What are the roles necessary to coordinate all the materials, machinery, equipment and people at the right time, to create our product or service? How do we maintain the quality standards demanded (necessary) by the market? How do we count what we produced, overproduced, underproduced to make sure production got done?

Organize Around the Work
As your volume builds, things begin to happen, problems crop up. Over and over. Some of the new work has less to do with production and more to do with operations, operational work. With some analysis, we begin to systematize the work with an eye to operational efficiencies and profitability. What analytic work is necessary? What systems need to be constructed and monitored? How do our systems prevent problems? How do we change our systems to accommodate new problems?

This is where you start, by looking at the roles in the organization. Organize around the work.