What Conway's Law Means for Your Organization
Conway's Law states that "organizations that design systems will design a system whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure …
Conway's Law states that "organizations that design systems will design a system whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."
“"Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure."”
— Melvin Edward Conway
What does that mean? I came across a great graphic by Manu Cornet, who drew this very situation – quite fitting, I think.
If we take a look at how Google is structured, we see clear similarities to its products: there is a wide interlocking and overlap, quite unlike Apple. There, everything is aligned to one central system (the hardware) and everything follows from it.
Zach Holman is one of the first engineers at GitHub and has talked in the past about GitHub's decentralized and asynchronous structure. Ryan Tomayko wrote a blog post about this kind of structure: Your team should work like an open source project
“By far the most important part of the talk – and the thing I hope people experiment with in their own organizations - is the idea of adopting the natural constraints of open source software development in designing internal processes and communication.”
In many ways, GitHub is structured like a series of open source projects, simply because it is a necessity: typical of an open source project is that we aren't all in the same room, nor do we work at the same times. There is usually no hierarchical top-down management. That explains why GitHub doesn't focus on centralized tools or reports. Something managers often want as a means of controlling employees. GitHub as a product focuses more on the needs of developers than on the needs of executives.
Now I wanted to know more
Since I could really identify with Conway's Law based on my own experience, I did some more research and came across other interesting "laws" by sociologists, economists and systems scientists:
- Brooks's Law
Brooks's Law describes that if you add resources to an already late (software) project, you only delay the project further. - Hackman's Law
Hackman's Law states that the larger a group is, the harder it becomes for its members to work together. Worse still, the group's susceptibility to difficulties increases sharply as it grows further. - Goodhart's Law
Goodhart's Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This means that if you only work toward measuring goal achievement, you have lost sight of the actual goal (a good product, service, etc.). - Larman's Law
Larman's Law states that organizations are implicitly optimized not to change the status quo of middle and senior management, of the “specialists” and their power structures. - Parkinson's Law
Parkinson's Law states that work always takes as long as the time I have available for it.
Well, what can I say? I can tick off every one of these laws...and you?