Your Change Team just completed a highly successful SAP implementation. Measureable benefits started early on and continue to flow in. You were given special recognition at the annual shareholder meeting. Today, you see in the Wall Street Journal that your company, second in its segment, is acquiring the third place firm. You stand by for a call to action by the CEO, but the phone never rings. You know that failure rates in these projects are between 50 and 85 percent. One KPMG study found that 83 percent of these deals hadn't boosted shareholder returns, while a separate study by A.T. Kearney concluded that total returns on M&A were negative.²   Sounds like a high risk proposition. What might you and your team’s role be in a merger-acquisition project? How might you get engaged?

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: