Managing Interfaces: A Key to Rapid Product and Service Development [Archive.org URL]

We all know that conventional management structures inhibit day-to-day interaction between departments. The problem shows itself when one department hands a project over to another at the end of a phase: “They can’t make what we’ve designed, and Marketing wants something else anyway!“

People from different departments and disciplines often work to different objectives. In an attempt to overcome the barriers to communication, senior managers may make the mistake of involving themselves at too low a level of detail. Lower-level managers find themselves held up by their lack of authority to make day-to-day decisions or by bureaucratic procedures. To suggest that the solution is “organizational restructuring“ is glib: the cost of the disruption it causes is often too high. The pragmatic solution is to focus attention on the deliverables required at the interfaces between phases of business activity. The interfaces correspond to those points at which big spending or resource decisions have to be made or where teams or functional responsibilities change – for instance, between development and production or between trials and production scale-up.

Interface Management (IM) helps senior managers achieve the results they want, not by telling different functions what to do, but by agreeing on objectives structured in a way that encourages the right involvement of the right groups at the right time.

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