Project-orientation causes focus on individual utilisation, which is a key contributor to bad culture
This individual-assignment problem prevents cross-fertilisation of skills, knowledge and experience. We WANT individuals to pair up and work together. We want cross-functional team members to pair up, not just the engineers. Through pairing and sharing, teams build bonds to support each other. Through pairing and sharing we build redundancy - if someone goes on leave, then someone else can cover for them if there’s an issue they know how to solve.
3 mistakes companies make when creating performance metrics
"We want to measure performance and report it to management..."
Don't do this:
1. Measure individual people's performance.
2. Focus on outputs.
3. Ignore the knock-on effects of those metrics.
Matrix organisation structure doesn’t suit modern software teams
Matrix organisations restrict skills acquisition, knowledge transfer, and portability of skills across teams and domains.
There are ways of breaking out of Matrix organisation, especially for I.T teams, and the benefits are faster teams, greater collaboration, increased cross-pollination of skills and capabilities, and many more.