Orglines was formed in part from a desire to help organizations operate better by clarifying roles, responsibilities, and relationships carried by their members. To this end, Orglines adopts a precise view of the elemental building blocks from which organizational structures are built.
Org Charts are traditionally shown as trees with each node representing a unique position and each arc representing a reporting relationship between two positions. This format clearly shows which positions are defined for an organization as a whole and how those positions relate to one another.
One can also think about the structure of an organization in terms of the way it is subdivided into divisions, departments, sections, groups, teams, etc… These labels (e.g. “division”) are completely arbitrary in the sense that they enjoy no standard definition or usage in today’s organizations. A “group” can be either the smallest unit of an organization (e.g. “QA Group”) or one of the largest (e.g. “Tata Automotive Group”). What is important, though, is that organizations are divided into smaller and smaller units, each of which has an identity and a specific function.
We often think of these subdivisions as groups of people. (Orglines also calls these subdivisions ‘organizations’. i.e.
organizations are made up of smaller organizations, which are in turn made of smaller organizations, each of which can contain any number of positions. For clarity, I will use the term ‘subdivision‘ here to refer to any organization that is part of a larger organization.)
However a subdivision can also be thought of as a partitioning of goals and accountability. Each subdivision — as a whole — has its own role to play, and while its role may be intricately coordinated with other subdivisions (we place a high value on cooperation and teamwork!), roles and responsibilities are not shared across subdivisions. Therefore, belonging to a subdivision means not only being a member of a group, but also sharing a commitment
to fulfilling the goals of that group and being accountable (along with other members) for the fulfillment of those goals.
Both the “hierarchy of positions” view and the “subdivision of goals and accountability” view of organizations are important and useful. Luckily, it turns out that there is (in organizations that are not broken) an exact correspondence between the two. Namely, for each position, there is exactly one subdivision. Although, as mentioned previously, we normally think about an organization as a group of people, from the “subdivision of goals and accountability” point of view, there is only one position in each subdivision whose scope of accountability is the same as the subdivision itself: the supervisor (every other position in that subdivision carries only a portion of the responsibility for the full scope).
Therefore, each subdivision defines the scope of accountability for a supervisor position, and vice versa. In other words, position and subdivision (or “organization”) are two sides of the same coin.
The fundamental building block of an organization model in Orglines is the “position”, which incorporates details about both the scope defined by that position and the actor who anchors it.
Orglines users create a “position” for each context in which they operate, giving the job title and description for that position, and identifying reporting reporting relationships that they have in that position (e.g. “I report to Bob, and Frank reports to me.”)
Note that once we have a position defined for each node in the tree (or block on the subdivision diagram) then we have everything we need to build up a complete picture of the organization: positions, job descriptions, reporting relationships, and breakdown of organizational goals.
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