Let’s paint a typical picture within a telecommunications company.
On one side, there are the “heroes”: the core network or IT infrastructure team. They operate in a perpetual state of crisis, working late nights and weekends. They are the only ones who can touch the critical legacy systems, so every single project in the company, big or small, ends up on their desk. They create an unavoidable “bottleneck” and are, naturally, constantly burning out.
On the other side, there are the “idle armies”: the marketing or product development teams. They have dozens of brilliant ideas, but all of them are “blocked,” waiting in a long queue for the first team to become available. They spend their time in meetings, refining plans that may never see the light of day.
This is not a problem of lazy or incompetent employees. It is a symptom of a fundamental flaw in the organizational design that kills speed and leads to employee demotivation and burnout.
The Diagnosis is Systemic Causes of Uneven Work Distribution
This imbalance is based on several deep, structural causes:
- Centralized and Narrowly Specialized Silos: The organization is built not around value creation, but around functional specialization (“The Billing Team,” “The Network Team,” “The CRM Team”). Unique knowledge is concentrated in these few teams, turning them into unavoidable and constantly overloaded bottlenecks for the entire company.
- Project-Based Resource Management: Human resources are allocated to large, long-term “projects.” This is inefficient. An employee might be 100% assigned to Project X, but for three months, their specific skill might not be needed. They are effectively idle while another project desperately needs their help. The system is too rigid to allow for the dynamic reallocation of talent.
- The “Hero” Culture: The company often, whether overtly or covertly, rewards the “heroes” who solve crises. This creates a vicious cycle: the system itself generates crises, the heroes are rewarded for fixing them, and therefore, no one has an incentive to change the system to prevent the crises in the first place. This leads to burnout and the risk of losing critical personnel.
- Lack of a Unified Prioritization System: Every department head lobbies for their own “most important” project. The overloaded central teams are bombarded with “urgent” tasks from all sides. As a result, they work not on what is most valuable to the company, but on whatever is currently “on fire.”
Organizational Design for Speed: Our Model for Agile Transformation
An organizational Agile transformation is not just about conducting training sessions. It is a complete overhaul of the company’s operating system and structure, focused on delivering value quickly and efficiently.
Step 1 (The Structural Level): Identifying Value Streams and Redesigning Teams
This is the most fundamental step. We help the company stop organizing around functions and start organizing around Value Streams. We ask the question: “What is the end-to-end process through which we deliver value to the customer?” (e.g., the “Mobile Services Value Stream”). Next, we reorganize the teams to align with these streams. Instead of a separate “Billing Team,” we create permanent, cross-functional “Squads” that have all the necessary competencies (IT, marketing, analytics) to serve that specific value stream. This distributes expertise and demolishes the system of centralized bottlenecks.
Step 2 (The Portfolio Management Level): Implementing Lean-Agile Portfolio Management
To solve the chaos of prioritization, we implement a unified, transparent system for managing initiatives. This goes beyond team-level Agile and addresses the company’s entire strategic planning. We work with senior leadership to create a single Portfolio Kanban board. All major initiatives from all departments are placed on this board. Leadership then collectively decides on strategic priorities and limits the number of initiatives in progress at any one time (WIP Limits). This forces the organization to make difficult but healthy strategic choices—to stop starting 50 projects at once and finishing none.
Step 3 (The Knowledge Management Level): Creating “Enabling Teams” and “Communities of Practice”
It’s impossible to completely dissolve all specialized teams; their deep knowledge remains valuable. Therefore, we transform them. The old “Network Architecture Team” becomes an “Enabling Team.” Their new job is not to do the work for the squads, but to enable the squads to do the work themselves. They build platforms, tools, and automated processes that other teams can use. They become teachers and consultants, not doers and bottlenecks. To ensure that knowledge is spread horizontally, we facilitate the creation of Communities of Practice (CoPs). For example, all the UX designers from different squads meet once a week to share experiences and maintain a unified design standard.
In Conclusion
Uneven workloads and burnout are not problems of individuals. They are symptoms of an outdated organizational design. The solution is not to hire more “heroes,” but to create a system where heroism is no longer required. An organizational Agile transformation is a complex, multi-layered process. It goes beyond team training and involves a complete rethinking of your structure, funding, prioritization, and the role of your experts. We provide the strategic roadmap and expert guidance for this profound and necessary journey of transformation.
