The Ministry Group as a Versatile Organization (unFIX Case Study)

Author: David Cummins, Ministry Group

When we read Jurgen Appelo's first blog post about the unFIX model for the versatile organization in September 2021, we immediately recognized the structures we had built in our own companies after introducing self-organizing teams. Back then, we had been working with what we had, following principles of self-management and agility. We created something that made sense for us at the time. We felt we were unlike other agile companies, so we needed our own solutions. We see now through the unFIX model that we were perhaps not so different from other organizations. The structures we have built can also help others, now that they are clearly defined according to principles and guidelines.

Not that we did everything "right." Indeed, several aspects of the unFIX model could have saved us some pain if we had had the model as a guide back in 2014. The following case study illustrates how our structures coincide with the principles of the unFIX model, changing and evolving through growth and crisis. We believe that it is evidence for the validity of the unFIX model. At the same time, this is a chance to reflect on what we could have done differently and what unFIX teaches us about some things that didn't work out so well.

Jurgen compares unFIX to Lego: you don't have to use all of the pieces, but they fit together in a certain way. How you use them depends on what you are building and what you need. We believe our example confirms this hypothesis. We are overjoyed to now be able to help our clients with their structures by using a framework that we know from experience but has been defined in an adaptable way. For many, it is a better alternative to currently popular models that do not fit all sizes or types of organizations.

How we continue to unfix the Ministry Group

What is the Ministry Group? Well, that has changed many times in the past two decades. Founded initially as a multimedia agency named "Ministry of Media" in 1999, the company began a deep transformation phase in 2012. Before that, for six years, Ministry had been a part of a holding together with a larger agency. As the current four owners bought the company out of the dependency and moved the employees to new offices, they created a new vision and expressed their reason to exist as follows: 

Enjoyment of our work and being proud of what we make – that is what drives us. Freedom, lightness, and the love of innovation give us space to develop and unfold. In this way, we produce creative products that inspire. 

Soon after, Ministry became a holding itself by establishing a social media agency next to the digital agency. By the end of 2013, over 45 people were working in the Ministry Group, which was more than twice the number of employees that had settled into the new offices the year before. In 2014, we responded to the growth by re-forming into self-organizing, interdisciplinary teams. 

It was a logical consequence for the four owners of the Ministry Group. We were getting too big to have the designers, developers, and project managers assigned to different projects on the fly without either implementing more control or breaking up into smaller teams. It was clear that a classical hierarchical structure was not suitable for our culture. The agile principles we had been trying to implement in an agency setting for years needed small teams of people with diverse skills and perspectives. These principles called for involvement, commitment, and quick decisions.

Figure 1: Ministry Group, internal structure 2014-2018

How we re-formed our organization, framed in the language of unFIX

Crews

Our name for crews at the time was "X-Teams." We derived the term from the cross in "cross-disciplinary," but it also lent the teams a sense of superpowers, we felt. These teams had all they needed to provide their clients with value and are analogous to genuine Value Stream Crews. We reduced dependencies as much as possible, but we could not spread some skills throughout all the teams, so we created a team to help other teams with their clients directly, that is, with the value streams. This team provided the services of concept writing, strategic planning, and copywriting. It was what the unFIX model defines as a Capability Crew. It seemed like a work-around to us at the time — a necessity because we didn't have enough people with these skills to put them on each team. UnFIX shows us that this is normal and plannable. In hindsight, we can say that not every team needed these skills full time, so the set-up worked well. 

The four owners viewed themselves as service providers for the organization. In the beginning, you could not see a difference between what unFIX calls a Platform Crew and the Governance Crew — the owners operated as general managers and as support for HR topics, IT infrastructure, teamwork facilitating, financial services, and more. But as we grew, we began to hire employees for the "Service Team" who could provide these services in a better way: a system administrator, an HR person, a team assistant, an accountant, and a controlling expert — all crew members who worked to keep things running and were available for specific support requests.

Our first agile coach worked with all the teams, dividing her time according to their needs, sometimes spending several weeks with one team more intensively while checking in with the other teams during their daily routines. She was our first Facilitation Crew.

We did not develop anything like an Experience Crew or an Acquisition Crew. At the time, we expected the value stream crews to take care of the clients' experience. We also tried to set up systems that enabled the teams to take care of their own acquisitions. The "Service Team" (Governance/Platform Crew) provided support whenever that didn't work. We will come back to these topics later in this article when we discuss what we have learned from experience and the unFIX model. 

The Base

Although the Ministry Group consisted of three companies by 2014, the organization operated as a single Base. Two of the 6 Value Stream Crews were technically individual companies (each with only one crew), but they all shared the same Platform Crew, Facilitation Crew, and ultimately the same Chiefs in the first years. 

The type of Base we had can best be described as "loosely aligned." According to the nature of our work at the time, each Value Stream Crew (X-Team) had its own client projects to create value for, but each also had several clients and, therefore, several projects simultaneously. It was not realistic at the time to have single-project crews. On the other hand, the same client could receive services and products from different teams. It was, for example, quite possible that the crew that created digital video products would work for the same client as another Value Stream Crew that provided digital advertising services. The cross-selling of the skills of different teams to the same clients was not only desirable for us, but it also provided more value for the clients. 

Leadership in the crews — what we did back then

We planned to give the teams more and more decision power. Right at the start, they decided how to execute their projects, coordinated their own working times and locations, and did their own vacation planning. Later, they made decisions about new team members, new clients, and the services they wanted to sell.

Teams needed to be able to make their own decisions, but they needed a framework to do it, which the four owners designed according to our principles and vision for the Group. The result was a light framework that left much freedom. An important part of this was the Delegation Board, which helped us visualize and continuously update which kind of decision teams should make by themselves.

And at first, we thought that the teams would not need formal leaders, which turned out to be wrong at the time being. Our development of leadership principles and what leadership means to us is a long story that we have told in various articles and books. For this case study, it is enough to say that our idea of leadership did not include a classical line management position — a boss in a team that could decide about compensation and punishments. The idea was that the teams should collectively make decisions and the designated leaders were there to help those decisions get made and make sure that the teams were connected to the bigger picture. It was entirely possible for a leader to pass on this role to a different person since it was not a career step in a hierarchy. This happened a couple of times. This role is more closely related to the Captain role of unFIX than traditional line management, even if it lacked the role clarity that unFIX provides. 

Forums

We also had what the unFIX model calls Forums, but they were primarily informal and called together when there was a need and desire to exchange with others in the same discipline from other teams. This was especially the case for the designers and developers of the organization. With these organization-wide meet-ups, they helped each other keep up with current trends, exchanged interesting information, and defined practices for developing and designing products throughout the companies. This was somewhat of a natural reaction to the new structures. Designers and developers especially were used to sitting in the same departments. Getting together frequently compensated for the trade-off of having fewer people of the same discipline to exchange ideas with and learn from on the same team.

What has happened since then

Companies grow and shrink. We knew this and didn't expect things always to stay the same. Indeed our whole set-up and our products are oriented toward this fact. We have been in the digital and internet industry since the nineties. What we did back then has little resemblance to what we do today. Change is rapid and inevitable in our business. 

To meet the needs of our clients in a better way, we separated the digital agency into an ad agency and a software company in 2018. While this was a good idea for the business side, we are afraid that we hurt our internal structures this way. The X-Teams dissolved into the company structures, and each company started trying to be its own Base with its own Chiefs while relying on the same Platform Crew and a management team that was more like a group of delegates from each company. After a while, we struggled with companies that didn't cooperate well. It took us time and effort to repair that. A large organization-wide project helped with this, allowing us to set up a temporary crew with members from different companies. We also restructured the management team. It became a diverse group of people from all companies, and it focussed solely on the whole organization in its work together. These changes helped us get back on track to unity. 

No one wants to think about shrinking. We like to believe companies should always get bigger, but that does not reflect reality. The Pandemic was not kind to us, and the consequence was to get smaller, which is a much better alternative to disappearing. One advantage of this has been to strengthen our focus on becoming one team again, which in "unFIX language" would be termed more correctly as one Base. It has also given us the chance to restructure ourselves for the next growth phase. Today we look something like this on the inside:

Figure 2: Ministry Group, internal structure 2022

This is still a loosely aligned Base, where each team has several projects and might work for the same clients as other crews but on different products. Also, the Chiefs are somewhat different now. Two of the owners are no longer Chiefs but have taken on Captain roles — one in a value stream and the other in a Capability Crew. There is now a third Chief who is not an owner of the companies. 

This is where we are now. Let's see what comes next.

What we would do differently today (and are doing differently)

While we still hold on to the principle that Chiefs provide services for the organization, we would now be more precise in differentiating between the services of the Platform Crew and the Governance Crew. Our beliefs and principles guide us in the kind of leadership we have in the organization, which is not immediately apparent by seeing Chiefs at the top of a Base. "Decisions should be made where the knowledge and competence for the decision are" has always been a guiding principle for us, and it continues to be so. But we have also learned that we need roles that are responsible for decisions getting made, even if we want to make them by agreement and with involvement. 

And through all that we have learned about leadership, placing line managers in a crew is a bad idea (we agree with Jurgen about that). Seeing Captains as responsible for the journey of a crew helps us define this kind of role in a much clearer way. Generally, this idea of a crew being on a journey together could have helped us see the teams as more temporary and versatile than turned out to be the case. Although people occasionally switched teams when there was a better role or fit, our teams generally began to display aspects of defending their territories long before we divided the digital agency into two companies. This territory-forming can happen even without classical line management, and it was one of our biggest challenges. 

For that reason, there are a few things we did that we no longer believe are good ideas. One example was having the teams create their own team names and identities. And another was the amount of responsibility we gave the teams for hiring new team members without enough knowledge in this area. Remember the saying "decisions where the knowledge and competence is?" Sometimes that is hard to judge. And no, don't worry, involvement and consulting the team about hiring are still essential values — we believe "delegate" was too much and strengthened the feeling that teams are permanent and separate.

Neither of these things is necessarily a bad idea. Having teams create identities and recruit their own members had positive aspects. It is, of course, important that people who work together can build relationships and feel safe in their environment. In our case, since we needed flexibility and cooperation throughout the Base, the trade-off of becoming too permanent and separate turned out to be the higher cost. Today we see more clearly that identity and the balancing sense of stability versus constant change need to be tied more strongly to the Base than to the crews — which coincides with the idea of dynamic reteaming and staying versatile as a business.

For the same reasons — and this we also learned from what we experienced — we see that the role of the Chiefs needs to be continuous (although changing). The crews and their captains take care of the journey, but the responsibility for the business needs to be in defined roles — especially when crews become more fluid. As mentioned above, these roles are not predetermined for the owners necessarily.

The advantages of unFIX for our future

The unFIX model shows us that we can grow and scale again — even larger than the almost 70 employees we had at our peak — still using already familiar structures. A better understanding of the different types of bases and crews will help us with this. Not all of the crew members will be employees, and not all will be sitting in an office together. 

One of our principles has always been about flexibility in working times and location. Despite that principle and the technical possibility of working from anywhere, we still preferred to be together at the office most of the time. This is, however, not necessary, and team members could be from different cities and countries. We are now opening up to this much more than in the past. We also no longer believe crews consist of employees only. Crews can contain members from partner organizations and freelance workers as well. 

Further, we are looking forward to experiments with new kinds of crews. We believe that Experience Crew is a fascinating idea that could benefit the clients in single projects and by expanding the range of services the clients receive to those of other crews in a much better way. Also, Acquisition Crews could be very interesting. Jurgen emphasizes the importance of fair treatment of everyone who signs a contract with the organization. We couldn't agree more, but we also see a possibility for this as a dedicated crew that hires employees, aligns partners and freelance workers, or even coordinates crew member changes and we think that could relieve and facilitate the teams enormously.  

Finally, we are very excited about becoming unFIX partners and helping our clients with this framework. Instead of just talking about how we did it (which has inspired many already), we can offer principles and guidelines that are a fit for our clients. We can develop — with them together — structures that make sense for the situations they are in and the goals they have.

The Ministry Group GmbH combines expertise in communication, technology, and organizational development to enable their clients to meet the challenges of transformation with courage and confidence. We provide services and use our knowledge, effective methods, and entrepreneurial experience to strengthen and inspire our clients on their journey.

More about the Ministry Group in German at http://ministrygroup.de or write to us at info@transformation.ministry.de