Creating a more efficient process is something engineers are awesome at. This idea isn't confined to manufacturing or software - on one level, you can do it with people too.

So - what's the best way to organise people so that we're all as efficient as possible?

Align by function or product?

Basic question. If you have a set of products being developed, do you arrange people by function (QA, testing, UI etc) or by product (Product A, Product B, Product C)?

Here are the advantages of going by product:

• Greater sense of ownership of the product
• You can easily have a "floater" to pitch in where needed
• Everyone involved in making a product is right next to each other
• Minimal transportation issues (if the product needs that)
• Communication is much easier
• You can understand how your part of the construction is fitting into the whole product
• Since your pay probably depends on the cell's output, everyone one can pitch in if someone in the cell isn't doing great
• This is pretty dependent on culture of the company and the country. This is taboo in some situations.

Here are the disadvantages of cells:

• People can feel more allied to the cell than the whole organisation
• So they might do things that benefit the cell, and poop on the organisation
• Since your pay probably depends on the cell's output, people might feel angry if someone in the cell isn't doing great
• Again, pretty dependent on culture of the company and the country

Managing by Stress

This sounds no fun at all, but it's useful up to a point, and certainly useful to know about.

Some process are just a bit crappy, and people throw resources at it to cover this up. An example of this is bringing in temp workers to cover a busy period - it's expensive and a short term fix, but it can quickly become habit.

Now, start to take away resources - for example, if you normally bring three temps, just bring in two. The chances are that you now don't have quite enough resources to patch things over, and this forces people to dig deeper at the underlying cause of the problem, and restructure for efficiency. If you have less people and things still need to get done, what choice do you have?

It's mean, I know - but in a decent company everyone is busy, and often the easy solution is to get it out of the way fast. This is a way of forcing people to think longer term.