Subgrouping and Conway's Law

Especially in larger groups working on the more complex tasks, subgrouping is the practice of forming a subgroup of the larger group in order to complete a subtask of the larger task. In task-oriented work groups, subgrouping is often driven by a combination of task demands and access to personnel. Some examples of factors influencing subgroup formation:

• The subtask might require special knowledge that only a few people have
• Completing the subtask might require special equipment or software that's available in only limited numbers
• The subgroup might be a unit of an independent enterprise acting as a subcontractor to the organization hosting the larger group
• The organization might designate the subgroup's members so as to avoid impractical combinations of time zones
• The roster of the subgroup might be designed to ensure that the people who worked on an earlier version of the subtask would be well represented
• A more dysfunctional example (of the many): Person A might be essential for completing the subtask, but Person A might be so difficult to work with that only a few members of the larger group can work with Person A in harmony

Communications technology reduces location constraints on subgroups

If the task demands that subgroup members work closely together and communicate often, then even as recently as 1990 or 2000, we would almost always assign people to the subgroup so that everyone was at the same site, or working in the same city or building. In terms of priority, location might have rivaled skill set.

Today's communications technologies can greatly diminish the impact of the location constraint. Access to videoconference technology is now so widespread that geography provides a much-reduced constraint on subgrouping. The demands of the task and personnel availability are now much more dominant than they once were.

Conway's Law

Conway's Law Access to videoconference technology
is now so widespread that geography
now provides only a much-reduced
constraint on subgroupingisn't actually a law in the legal sense. It's a pattern first described in 1968 by computer scientist Melvin Conway, and named "Conway's Law" by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month. [Conway 1968] [Brooks 1982] The Law says, "…organizations which design systems…are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." Conway also observes:

This kind of a structure-preserving relationship between two sets of things is called a homomorphism. Speaking as a mathematician might, we would say that there is a homomorphism from the linear graph of a system to the linear graph of its design organization.

As Conway puts it even more concisely, "Systems image their design groups." Specifically, for each pair of interacting system elements A and B, there is an interacting pair of groups of system designers, A' and B', respectively responsible for system elements A and B.

Conway's Law has implications that reach beyond system design. For example, it's likely a cause of the formation of technical debt in cases where reorganizations or organizational acquisitions have broken the homomorphism between the social architecture of the organization and the technical architectures of the systems that organization maintains. [Brenner 2019.4] [Brenner 2019.5]

The role of Conway's Law in subgrouping

Subgrouping might also provide an example of Conway's Law (the Law). But in a fascinating twist, in subgrouping, the Law likely works in a direction opposite to the sense of the law as expressed by Conway. One can understand how the Law constrains an organization to produce system designs that, in Conway's words, "image their design groups." But suppose a task-oriented work group is performing maintenance on an existing system. When it forms subgroups, the demands of the task constrain how the subgroups form. In this way, the subgroups image the system.

If this is so, then when the task requires a period of intensive work on Subtask A, the work group would tend to form a subgroup (Subgroup A) to attend to Subtask A. Subgroup A might then develop along the lines of Tuckman/Jensen's Developmental Sequence for small groups, finally Adjourning when Subtask A is complete. [Tuckman & Jensen 1977]

Communications technology weakens the geographical constraint

Formerly, the geolocation of group members constrained communication patterns. That is, people who needed to work closely together had to be located conveniently to each other. Now, though, as noted above, geography plays a more limited role in determining communication convenience.

Consequently, when subgroups form, geography likewise plays a more limited role than it did even 20 years ago. By employing modern communications technologies, we gain freedom to define subgroups that more closely produce a homomorphism between the work underway and the subgroup structure.

Last words

Meanwhile, while Subgroup A does its work, other subgroups might "form, develop, and adjourn in parallel with Subgroup A, though not necessarily in synchrony. In very large groups, a subgroup "foam" might develop, with each subgroup progressing through its own Tuckman/Jensen stages at its own rate. Potentially, at any given time, one subgroup or another might always be Storming. To an outside observer, the larger group might appear to be constantly Storming, and so chaotic as to provide a counterexample to Tuckman's model of group development, when actually Tuckman's model is being confirmed many times over, subgroup-by-subgroup.  Top    Next Issue

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Footnotes

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