Your Organisation Chart Is Quietly Working Against Your Customers

It does not. And that is the problem.

In The Journey to Service Excellence, John Sansbury makes an observation that explains why so many capable enterprises deliver mediocre service. Value does not flow down the org chart. It flows across it, at ninety degrees to the management structure, along what he calls the service and process axis.

Take payroll. No single team delivers it. Applications, databases, infrastructure and data transmission teams all play a part in making sure every employee is paid the correct amount at the agreed time. The service works only when those capabilities are combined and coordinated. Yet almost all management attention, budgeting and reporting runs up and down the vertical axis, team by team, silo by silo.

The consequences are predictable. Each team optimises its own performance, and the end-to-end service falls through the gaps between them. The book records one large retail group candidly admitting that until it could remove its enterprise silos, it could not successfully adopt service management at all. That honesty is rare. The condition is not.

Two practical correctives stand out.

The first is matrix management. Processes that deliver services need managers who can act across team boundaries. An incident manager must be able to interrupt a second line team's day job to restore a failing service, despite having no line authority over them. If your culture cannot tolerate that, your processes are decorative.

The second is a service catalogue, built in-house, never outsourced. Its real value is not the document. It is what happens to your people while they build it. Naming and describing each service forces technical teams to see what they do through the consumer's eyes. The payroll service is not an application and a server. It is staff receiving the correct pay on time. The book suggests a simple discipline: name every service in five words or fewer, focused on the outcome, with no jargon. "Management of personnel records" says what it does. "Storage of employee data" describes a filing cabinet.

Structure follows strategy, but service follows structure. If your customers' experience is nobody's job, it will be done accordingly.