I was having a conversation over breakfast this morning about whether partnerships were unable to scale and suffered from endemic bad management. I wondered if an organizational innovation, such as structuring the firm in a public and hierarchical manner, would bring greater efficiencies. The issue in that instance is would employing sales specialists be better at establishing new business than a partner doing the selling under the wider authority of the company and services.

Public companies when faced with poor results often seek to 'reorganize' in order to become efficient. It is doubtful whether it works in those instances; however managerial technologies such as TQM/TQC and Six Sigma have made massive differences in terms of quality and customer service.

Organizational technologies do count and do make a difference. A good example of how a simple organizational change can bring massive benefits is systematic drill in 16thC European armies. Along the same lines Dave Feinlab identified organizational agility as a main reason that one company will out succeed its competitors.

Phoenix University is an interesting study in this area of competing economic organization. They are a public company (now) and went up against heavily institutionalized colleges in the United States. Phoenix University's managers were judged by modern managerial empirical methods and their sales staff was very aggressive in trying to recruit new students to the university.

It is interesting that they have not replaced the older institutionalized colleges, however Phoenix University is a very large and successful company. They fill a wide niche, however, it is arguable that they would not have succeeded by mimicking the existing collegiate and academic structure.

The final prescription is lacking though.

Andrew Leigh links to this interesting study [pdf] on the introduction of modern management practices in India and their influence on productivity, quality and firm culture. This struck a chord;

We also find two other major impacts of better management practices. First, owners delegated greater decision making power over hiring, investment and pay to their plant managers. This happened in large part because the improved collection and dissemination of information that was part of the change process enabled owners to monitor their plant managers better. As a result, owners felt more comfortable delegating

Anecdotally I agree with this. One of the reasons I like continuous integration is that i can see how the software and the development team is progressing. I constantly monitor the process to ensure the builds aren't broken and that the unit tests are constantly climbing in number.

It is a good macro feedback loop for how the quality of the software is improving and also if there is problem code being checked in. A broken test is usually a good sign of someone not understanding modern software development techniques and needing some help in improving.

The other good thing about continuous integration is that it is a shared responsibility. We all share in the responsibility to fight the inherent entropy in software development and keep the code to a high standard. I love the idea of refactoring that each time you touch the code you improve the design of it and leave it in a better state than when you first touched it or saw it.