An analysis of the production process at Fabrique, a Dutch multi-disciplinary design company for new media, brand-development, graphic design and industrial design in Delft, led to a better division of tasks and a new organization structure. The work is now done more effectively and at higher quality. Fabrique has been working with SCM since 2004. About 90 people work for the company that was founded in 1992. It has won many awards for its designs. Fabrique works for consumer brands, the entertainment, culture and service industries, the government, and the educational field.

Paul Stork is the CEO of Fabrique. He explains: "The organization used to have relatively small teams with eight people per team, who would share one room together. A team was made up of designers, programmers and project leaders. The team leader, a foreman who took part in the work, used to direct the team. He or she was responsible for the well-being and development within the team. This work, including performance reviews, was an additional part of the team leaders' job, in addition to their project work."

The team leaders did not carry any responsibility for the financial or qualitative aspects of the work. That responsibility was relegated to the two department leaders supervising all the teams. In the hierarchy, these department leaders were in between the team leaders and the directors. However, the directors, Stork among them, were also involved in defining the content of projects and maintaining client relations.

Mommy-and-daddy-behavior
This structure was awkward in a few ways. It was unclear who was in charge of the production process or who was responsible for what. Thus, there was a lot of "mommy-and-daddy-behavior," as Stork calls it. "If one department leader forbid something, people would turn to the next one to get approval. To steer towards quality was difficult as well. The directors were oriented mainly towards quality of content, while the project leaders concentrated more on the quality of process."

Furthermore, the leadership at different levels went in different directions. One team member could, for example, dedicate extra time to a project with the blessing of one director for the sake of a client satisfaction, while in hindsight the decision was poor from a financial point of view, according to the assessment of the department leader.

Better tuning
Everybody knew that there was room for improvement in organizing the work, and there were repeated agreements to address the problems. But nobody was responsible for the implementation of agreements, since there was no clarity about the authority attached to certain tasks. So, the agreements only led to half-baked solutions.

The Sociocratisch Centrum's solution was to change the organization structure. The domains of the departments were clearly defined and their various functions were tuned to each other. The changes improved co-ordination between leadership and implementation and between production and sales. In other words: the processes within the departments (circles) regained their steerability through formulation of the leading, doing and measuring tasks in the process of a department (circle).

The tangle disentangled
What does the organization of Fabrique look like at the moment? Paul Stork says there are three departments now. "They work cross-media, like before: they work on both in-print media and the internet. Each has its own clients and carries its own responsibility for their sales and quality. Two of these three - which are also the largest - now have a department leader who supervises full time. The third department is still of too small for this arrangement, but it might get its own leader in the future. For the time being, the leader is a "working supervisor"."

The tangle of leadership lines which used to be criss-crossing the enterprise, has been disentangled quite well. The department leader is in charge of well-being, quality, development, and finance. This person also directs the project leaders, who are concerned with the day-to-day progress of work. The departments also define their own policy, under the proviso that they tune it to the other departments, so that it does not go against the general aims of Fabrique.

Everything is now so much more steerable, according to Stork. No more mommy-and-daddy-behavior and the business has gained momentum, too. He gives an example: "We've launched a new plan to improve the profitability of projects. Its execution went slowly at first. But, now that we've made our organizational changes, we can track the project owner. Things are going much faster, and profits are up."

New role for directors
As a director, Stork is now less involved in matters of implementation. He no longer needs to worry about deadlines for projects or applications for courses or conventions because it is the leaders' responsibility. Marketing is his first task now. He laughs: "If I slip back sometimes to my old habit of mingling with a project, the department and project leaders are empowered to correct me, because it is clear now who is in charge of what."

This "correctional value" of the new structure can be seen as a precursor to what appears to be a logical next step. In the future, commercial activities that are now carried out by directors and advisors could be delegated to the departments as well. Stork: "Department workers do not want to sit and wait for assignments, but rather do their own marketing. They do not wish to be waiting for food, like a nest of young birds, their hungry beaks wide open, are waiting for a worm."

Once that's in place, the departments will have become organisms with the ability to sustain their own existence. Then they will hold three important functions in their own hands: to see to it that they get input, produce something, and deliver their product.

Will Stork be able to rest on his laurels from then on? No, drawing from his project experience, he'll range from thinking about the company's future to lending shape and form to cooperation with partners, from maintaining client relations to innovation.

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