Alphas of organisation

Specialised/extended version of Project alphas.

This ontology could be used in the practices/disciplines of entrepreneurship (notably, governance), management, and development.

Headers of the subsections start with the name of the corresponding project alpha, and name the high-level discipline, corresponding to this project alpha.

Relative to the standard project alphas, one extra is added: governance and control. I’m also not sure that the separation between lifecycle operations and operational management, as well as between methodology, development, and people/culture management makes a lot of sense, perhaps the ontology could be made even more compact and clear.

Opportunity: entrepreneurship

• Mission (intent, if we consider the organisation as an agent, in Ontology of methodology)

  • Activity and discipline: mission development, which itself relies on ethics, entrepreneurship, economics, aesthetics, systems thinking, and other transdisciplines.

• Strategy

  • Activity (and the corresponding discipline): strategising. Relies on the knowledge of the latest technology/scientific developments and trends.

• Marketing and sales

Stakeholders: relations (part of entrepreneurship)

• Investors

• Existing and prospective customers

• Community

• The public

• Government/policymakers

• Existing and prospective employees

• Internal roles (not people!)

• Etc. (depending on the specific organisation)

There are activities (and corresponding disciplines) for all these types of stakeholders: investor relations, customer relations, PR, GR, HR (which could mean “human relations” rather than “human resources” in this context), etc.

Governance and control (also part of entrepreneurship)

• Governance, including monitoring and control

• Legal matters, including the matters of ownership and rights

System Description: design and engineering

Architecture, detailed designs, and lifecycle designs (including manufacturing process design, operations methodology, disposal/phase-out plans)

• Activities and disciplines: design, engineering

System: (lifecycle) operations

• Engineered/manufactured systems/items/products

  • Activities and disciplines:

    • Manufacturing

    • Integrations, installations, deployments

    • Maintenance, run-time operations, support

    • Disposal, phase-out

Work: management

• Resources: money, computing power, purchased items, food and workplace (for employees)

  • Activities and disciplines:

    • Accounting and financial control

    • Procurement and IT

    • Process/manufacturing management, product lifecycle management (PLM)

    • Integration management, customer management (this could be considered part of PLM if it is thought of as the full product lifecycle, not just the manufacturing phase)

• Customers

  • Activities and disciplines: customer management, account management

• Activities: work items, tasks, projects, lifecycle operations, “activity streams” (such as the very activities mentioned on this page)

  • Activity and discipline: operational management

• Work products: decisions, agreements, plans, system descriptions (documentation, source code, manufacturing plan descriptions), manufactured products/systems

• Configurations

  • Activity and discipline: configuration management

Method of work: methodology and development

• (Organisational) roles: functional objects, each determined by a certain discipline (methodology). This page itself outlines the organisational methodology at a high level and implies high-level organisational roles, such as strategy (as a role, played by a certain constructive object: person, team, computer, etc., performing the activity of strategising), marketing, stakeholder relations, engineering, etc.

• Disciplines (of all activities mentioned and assumed on this page)

  • Activities and disciplines: methodology, enterprise architecture

• Capabilities. A capability is the mastery of a discipline (know-how possessed by some constructive object of the organisation: a person, a team, or the whole organisation), plus enabling systems/tools, plus requisite resources.

  • Activities and disciplines: learning, development, hiring, M&A.

    • The mastery of these disciplines is called organisational intelligence, which itself could be split into some disciplines. See Organisational intelligence disciplines, which, in turn, depends on the intelligence of individual people, though is not completely determined by it, i. e., the collaborative intelligence is synergistic.

Team and assets: ?

I’m not sure what the high-level discipline for this alpha should be called. People are “managed” (itself an ill-suited word for this activity) by people managers, “culture departments”, etc. The C-level role is often called “Chief People Officer”. Asset managers deal with the assets.

• Constructive objects: people-at-positions (employees), teams/organisational units/departments, groups/committees, computers, robots, other assets.

  • The cost of acquisition of these resources (acqui-hires, sign-on bonuses, purchases of computers and robots, etc.), as well as the operational costs (compensation, electricity bills, maintenance and depreciation of the equipment, etc.), determine the resource viewpoint of the organisation-as-a-system.

  • Activities and disciplines: leadership, enterprise architecture, hiring, M&A, asset management.

• Culture (see The Reality Group, The Culture Code, “Don’t fuck up the culture”, etc.)

  • Diversity, equality, and inclusion

  • Organisational psychology