Bilot started its journey to become a self-organizing company five months ago. First discussions about the whole thing happened only a couple of months before the kickoff, but the actual change process started just a few weeks before the first self-organizing pilot team of 24 experts was established. Many people have asked and are still asking, why Bilot is doing this.
Bilot is an independent and customer focused business technology company with 120 experts in Finland and in Poland. Bilot was founded in 2005 by leading experts in their field and is regarded as a pioneer when it comes to adopting and developing the latest SAP and Microsoft solutions. Bilot is a growth company and adapting to change has meant regular evolution in organizational and management structures.
The structure has always been a traditional line organization. Technology based consultant teams have been small and every team manager has had 3-8 subordinates. Team managers have reported to a director on the senior management team. Sales, operations, business support and development were matrix functions.
People have been taken really good care of. Development discussions were coordinated and trained by HR, employees’ satisfaction to their supervisors was surveyed twice a year and line management was coached to communicate and implement company strategy in their teams. Feedback was gathered and filtered by the manager and discussed in development discussions.
When everything was supposedly fine, why did we want to change?
Bilot operates in a business which changes rapidly. Challenges to hold on to and increase ones market position and keep ahead of others are enormous to any company, let alone in the IT business. We operate in many solution areas and we cater to large customers with complex IT environments. The demands to understand our customers’ businesses in many industry segments is pretty tough. This kind of business dynamic requires versatile skills from every single consultant. In order to be the best-in-class consultant you must follow your customer’s business closely and develop your technical skills continuously.
Our moderate size and fast growth defines us as a comparatively agile company. We have never been allowed to be stuck in old ways of thinking, but our organizational structure has not entirely reflected our philosophy. We do not believe in any company’s senior management’s superiority in sufficiently understanding our customer’s needs and always making the best decisions. We do believe in leadership, but leadership is not something that should be limited to a handful of people in a company. Leadership belongs to every role from the shop floor to the board room.
There are many critical success factors in this change at Bilot. People need support no matter which organizational structure they belong to. So we have trained mentors and coaches to offer support and sparring, when anyone feels the need for it. We are improving our communication methods, from top-down communication to collaboration and facilitation. Again, tools and training are needed. Direct feedback is essential for every expert, so no filtering is allowed anymore. The trick is how you provide the feedback, and this is the reason we emphasize in facilitation skills.
Processes and roles are changing quite a bit. Role descriptions are important for communicating the new ways of working and new sets of responsibilities. We also came up with a new way of describing processes and we changed the old swim lines and boxes to process maps based on the network of roles. Our organizational chart is a picture of a living organism with cells and neural networks with axons and synapses.
And last but not least, we must be able to dismantle the old power structures and distribute it appropriately. This is the hardest part. Every employee needs to feel that they have authority to do a good job and make great and successful business, as part of a self-organizing team. This is a challenge for every member of the self-organizing teams from now on.
