The bottom-up/top-down pattern: an organizational pattern for a balanced management system

A balanced management system requires a balanced composition of bottom-up and top-down activities. The larger the company/division/organization is, the less manageable and the less effective is an unstructured interaction of bottom-up and top-down activities. The bottom-up/top-down interaction usually is hierarchically structured, lacking in interaction between different business units and therefore lacking in synergy. The paper proposes the concept of management components as a topic-based structure of bottom-up/top-down interaction. The concept is presented in form of an organizational pattern. The pattern is called bottom-up/top-down pattern. Further on in this paper, a short case study shows how this concept is implemented at Siemens program and system engineering PSE, a 5000 engineers R&D division of the Siemens AG.