Business literature is full of ideas on how to design your organization.  The leading ideas that show up repeatedly are designs to make your organization more customer centric¹, designs to improve decision making², and adopting designs that create a measureable improvement³.   All three of these outcomes can be achieved by focusing on an organization’s business processes for the design and understanding the new structure will require a clear focus on the people and teams that do the work for successful implementation.

The following approach has proven successful in previous organization designs:

1. Develop a macro model of the organization’s service or product delivery processes.  The process names will vary depending on the business, but all should result in something delivered or ready for delivery to the customer.  As a rule of thumb, organizations generally have 3 to 7 processes in their macro model.  The model may ultimately be a basis for organization, but in the early stages it creates a framework for analysis. In a services environment this model might include cross-functional processes such as:
2. Establish any constraints or assumptions that will be used to establish future state process and organization.  Such limits might be headcount, required customer interactions, cycle time, or number of department hand offs.
3. Engage your people and customers in the redesign.  Let them know what you are thinking and how they may be affected.  If you intend to reduce headcount be honest and let them know.  Gather their ideas and provide responses, even if you are saying no.  This type of engagement should continue throughout the effort.
• New Service Deployment
• Initial sales and deployment Customer support,
• Service extensions and renewals 
4. Analyze one or two levels of process that make up the macro processes.  This would normally be done in workshops made up of participants in the process including a mix of hands on workers and supervisors.  This analysis normally begins with a brief review of current process, cycle times and customer interactions.  The workshop would then spend a majority of its time looking at future state that includes how the processes interact.   The workshop will produce a report including the new processes, metrics, and business rules that apply to decision points within the process.
5. Conduct a public review of all workshop reports.  This is done after all macro processes have been completed.  Ideally, everyone who may be impacted by the restructuring should have the opportunity to comment.
6. Refine and complete reports based on comments. 
7. Based on final reports develop an organizational model based on the final processes.  This structure should minimize handoffs between the processes and focus each organization element on the customer.
8. Define roles and jobs required to support the process and structure.  Roles are defined first in alignment with the process.  Roles are then combined to define required jobs and experience levels.  Note: Only after this activity does the organization consider who will fill those jobs/roles.  If jobs are defined based on the people and their skills and experience, then politics, power struggles, and personality clashes result. 
9. Define gaps between current structure, staff, and floor plans and the new structure.  These gaps might involve skills, staffing levels, and tools and equipment including systems.
10. Develop and execute a project plan to close gaps and stabilize the organization in the new structure.

¹ Jay R. Galbraith, Organizing to Deliver Solutions, Organization Dynamics, May 2002

²  Marcia W. Blenk, The Key To Successful Corporate Reorganization, Forbes, July 2010

³  Brad Power, Define Your Organization's Habits to Work More Efficiently, Harvard Business Review, May 2013

Terry Holtz, PMP

EVP Project Services

TBO International

tholtz@tbointl.com

 @terryholtz1