be a good start.
The Joys of Middle Management
Just who are the middle managers in an organisation? What do they do, where do they come from and why are there so many of them? Well, we could enjoyably argue about the definition until the end of time, especially if we let any middle managers join in the discussion. However, let's just for the purposes of this debate define them as people in the organisation who report to a manager, but also have managers working for them. In other words, they are not directly connected either to any real work that goes on, nor to the leadership who are making strategic decisions at the top. This insulation from reality means that these creatures can sometimes live in a strange and wondrous world of their own, where the skills of managing meaningless meetings and enduring endless emails have risen to the status of high art.
“Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.”
Much fun is poked at middle managers, and they are often parodied as being faintly ridiculous. However, they are creatures of nascent danger to any IT leader. This is not because they are bad people, but because they are managers. As managers, they will feel that they are able to make things happen, not only on their patch but elsewhere in the organisation as well.
Middle managers who use computers often feel that they have a right to both demand and get a shiny new software application to help them do their job. This “right of entitlement” is an unusual concept in corporate life that seems unique to IT. Managers certainly won't dare ask for new carpets or large office plants. The management grading system has taken care of that. Woe betide you if you are a grade 17 manager asking for some grade 19 foliage. But ask these people about computers and they will become deeply agitated about their urgent need for an expensive new departmental application that could cost millions. Managers will also fervently believe that their application must be grotesquely customised to meet their every whim. Whether you like it or not, most of the impetus for new IT investments in your company will come disproportionately from the middle management. My own personal record was to discover nearly 700 active IT projects in an organisation of only 40,000 people. With a project budget of a mere £20m, this meant that each project was spending £28,571.42 each year. It's hardly surprising that few were ever finished.
Q. “How can you tell the difference between a Middle Manager and a Senior Manager?”
A. “The Middle Manager always thinks he needs more resources and more people to get things done. The Senior Manager is just the opposite – he thinks he is expending too much resource with too many people.”
Is this a bad thing? Well, it need not be so, but certain obstacles get in the way of having an effective middle management community living in a utopian harmony of peace and love with the IT organisation. Here are some of them.
As I've already suggested, there are often quite large numbers of middle managers in any large corporate organisation. This is because most companies base their operating models on pyramidal organisational structures. The structures are generated through work breakdown models, often based on function or geography. A company might break itself up into several divisions (such as R&D, Product Development, Sales and Marketing, Production & Distribution etc.). Each of these divisions can then be further broken down into smaller units. Sales and Marketing for example, could be divided geographically into regions (such as North America or Europe), and then subsequently decomposed further into country organisations and perhaps finally into sales territories. In this model, significant numbers of middle managers are created as the organisation unfolds layer by layer.
The upshot of all this is that if you are not careful, then you can end up with an alarming number of levels in an organisation. There may also be quite impressive numbers of people who are “managing” things rather than “doing” things. The average number of people who report to each of these supervisors dictates both the number of middle managers and the number of hierarchical layers in the company. Many organisations do not pay attention to this important detail. As a result they can quickly become overwhelmed with barbarian hordes of middle managers swarming around the halls and offices.
Figure 1.3 shows what happens if an organisation unfolds with reporting lines of 1:5, 1:8 and 1:11. In effect, each layer of the organisation will have 5, 8 or 11 people reporting to each manager at each level of the company.
Figure 1.3 The Relationship between Management Span and Organisational Size
If you compare the three models, you will notice that the 1:5 model requires seven levels of management structure to accommodate a mere 19,531 managers and staff. However, the same number of levels would support 299,593 people in the 1:8 ratio. But if you structure your organisation at 1:11, then a staggering 1,948,717 can be accommodated. The number of managers in an organisation is often an unintended side-effect of the reporting spans you choose. For example, even in a medium-sized company of 20,000 people, the spans make a huge difference. In the 1:5 model above, 3,906 managers are required to man such a company, whereas the 1:11 model will only deploy 1,464 supervisors. If it costs $80,000 to employ a manager, then the extra 2,442 managers required in the 1:5 span organisation will add nearly $200m of operating cost to the company. So if you ever wondered why management consultants are always banging on about layers, spans and flatter structures then this is the reason why. One organisation where I worked operated with an average management to staff ratio of 1:5½. Under cover of the 2008 recession, we ran a program which consultants would call “delayering” the company. We tasked each part of the organisation to make structural alterations to their reporting lines so that the management/staff ratio moved towards a target of 1:8. This had a startling impact. We found that we were able to remove nearly 2,500 managerial and clerical posts out of a white collar workforce of 19,800 without causing major disruption to the business. This saved more than £120m of annual operating costs. In comparison, to achieve £120m of profit, the company would have to sell nearly £1.5 billion of equipment and services (which was never going to be easy in the deepest recession in living memory).
“If sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.”
Short organisational spans of five or less reports per manager lead to towering management structures comprised of many layers, populated by very large numbers of managers. Furthermore each manager will also have rather less responsibility and rather more time on their hands compared to their counterparts in flatter structures. Should you belong to such a low-span company, then you can probably look forward to a great deal of middle management attention. There is also likely to be heavy demand for lots of new computer systems. Now might be a good time to undertake a quick analysis of the structure of the company to identify the low-span zones. There's a very good chance that these are the areas where most of the pent-up demand for new projects, systems and services are coming from. Conversely, a line manager with fifteen reports is likely to be far too busy to be thinking about trivial things like IT. He or she will be focussed on the important job of keeping their head above the ever rising waters. However, should a heavily loaded manager ever get very passionate about wanting some electronic assistance then there is likely to be a very good reason for it.
“An overburdened, over-stretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.”
Linkage is a major problem for any IT leader. This is often because many companies still fail to recognise that the most senior IT leader must be a fully paid up member
