Basically, there are four different types of roles and people.

• Doers: These people are the backbone of keeping everything running.
• Doing-Thinkers: These people do the work and then take into consideration what needs to be done to fix what they just did.
• Thinking-Doers: These people consider all of the work to be done before doing the work.
• Thinkers: These people no longer have the time or the operating access to actually implement. This is not part of their role. They need to maintain a much larger picture.

The Five Pillars of IT-Business Management: Thinkers, Creators, Doers, Deciders and Watchers

Thinker/Doer/Creator/Decider/Watcher (5-pillars) is a framework to help understand the composition of their technology workforce and quickly identify areas of improvement. Based on scores of projects across a wide range of industries, the 5-pillars framework analyzes the ratio of different types of roles within a technology function, dividing them roughly into Thinkers (who provide strategic framing, vision, and prioritization), Doers (who produce output, and have their “fingers on the keys”), Creator (who bring new ideas, products, and art into existence through their imagination and creativity), Decider (who make final decisions for setting goals, developing strategies, and ensuring the stability of the business growth) and Watchers (who oversee and facilitate processes and communication).

Doers/Creators/Deciders tend to comprise up to 75% of the tech organization in companies with more advanced technology functions. This group includes developers, engineers, testers, and other operational roles. Watchers include business analysts, project managers, and the management team. Ideally, watchers make up less than 15% of the organization, because the shift to modern ways of working has reduced the need for such roles. Thinkers - a group that includes product managers, data scientists, and architects - should make up about 10% of a technology workforce.

While not a perfect instrument or a hard-and-fast rule, 5-pillars analysis helps leaders understand their often huge, varied, and dispersed workforces, by categorizing them in smaller, more manageable groups. This can help pressure-test levels of overhead, bureaucracy, and skill-sets in the organization.