Divide and Conquer

Problem: Organizations grow to the point where they cannot easily manage themselves (i.e., the organization's decision process breaks down).

Context:

The roles have been defined for a process and organization, and the interactions between them are understood.

Forces:

If an organization is too large, it can't be managed.

Incohesive organizations are confusing and engender dilution of focus.

Separation of concerns is good.

It is useful to have organization boundaries that are somehow lightweight.

Solution:

Find clusters of roles that have strong mutual coupling, but that are loosely coupled to the rest of the organization. Form a separate organization and process around those roles.

Resulting Context:

Each new suborganization is a largely independent entity to which the remaining patterns in this language can be independently applied.

Design Rationale:

See the description of the forces. Note that each sub-organizations that arises from this pattern is fodder for most other patterns, since each subsystem is a system in itself. Also, to see an organization that has been reverse engineered and redivided into new processes, see the picture for the pattern Move Responsibilities.

Next: De-couple Stages