Anticlue

Group by IT practice

In large development group organizations, there are various ways to support different functions. In Application support, sometimes groups are split up by departmental functionality. For example, the IT division is split into various departments that manage certain business processes. This group deals with all technology requests regarding patient registration. Departmental functionality does do a great job of giving a department one single point of contact for relaying the status of projects, issues, and other requests. On the other hand from a technology viewpoint it really does a disservice, because the practice creates silos. Each IT department has one or two individual that are either programmers; an implementer; screen designers/builders; interface specialists; and/or dbas. The outcome is that each it department has disparate practices and skillsets.

It may be better to divide application support into the skillsets needed, and have a centralized project management office. For example, have a group of individuals who are experts at mapping out workflow and obtaining business requirements. Create another group of people who are the implementers of the organizations, the project managers, then organize the developers under a central group, as with the interface experts, and with the reporting experts. Split testing and change control functions into specialized individual groups. This practice would eliminate people working in silos and provide better cross training with similar skillsets. The single point of contact could arise out of the project managemetn office or the business analysts group. Also this split would highly increase the repeatable processes, and lessons learned would arise with a greater understanding. This type of organizational design would also leverage any organizations contraints of time, cost, and quality.