Work Architecture

Ask two people on the same team how a weekly report gets made. You will get two answers, both partly right, and neither of them written down anywhere.

Work Architecture is the plan that would have settled it. Not the org chart, which shows who reports to whom. Not the process document, which describes a version of events that may never have happened. The real thing: which pieces of work exist, who or what does each one, how the output gets checked, and where the knowledge goes afterwards.

Most companies have never drawn it, and for a long time they did not need to. People fill holes without being asked. Someone notices the number looks wrong and quietly fixes it on the way past. The gap in the plan is covered by goodwill nobody has ever costed.

That stops working when part of the work moves to a machine. A machine will not notice that a step was skipped. It will not walk over to someone's desk. Everything the plan left unsaid now has to be said.

So this domain covers breaking work into pieces small enough to hand out on purpose, deciding what goes to a person and what goes to a model, designing the check that follows, and getting the whole thing out of one person's head.

It is the spine. Everything else here hangs off it.