Field study 03/Tests Thesis 001
Planning by workflow
Headcount planning ran on job titles while the work ran on cross-functional workflows nobody owned. Would planning around workflows change where the escalations went?
Strengthened- Organization
- B2B software · 1,200 people
- Duration
- 3 quarters · 2025 to 2026
- Sponsor
- Chief operating officer
- Institute
- Tomasz Wierzbicki, Jeff Wald
Thesis 001 · The Job Is No Longer the Unit of Work
Nobody knows what work a company actually contains.
Org charts list people, not work. No company holds an inventory of the work it contains, so it cannot say which tasks are duplicated, which are obsolete, which are load-bearing, or what any of them are worth. The system is a work architecture that inventories, classifies and prices work at the task level. It is the replacement for the job description.
Quarter by quarter
- Q0
Baseline written with the sponsor before any intervention.
- Q1
Intervention designed against the thesis under test and put into practice with the operator's own people.
Against the written baseline
31% fewer open-role escalations to the executive team.
12 workflows now carry their own plan and steward.
3 quarters observed.
This study is recorded against Thesis 001. Its verdict (strengthened) is reflected in that thesis's revision history.
What this study cannot establish
- Pre-post comparison. A hiring freeze during the second period is a confound.