Organisation design
Read
the following three statements and choose the one that you think best
describes effective organisation design:
| A. Organisation design is rearranging boxes on the organisation chart to get the right people in the right place. |
| B. Organisation design is about adopting the organisation design wisdom of the day, as defined by management journals. |
| C. Organisation design is about defining your organisation’s specific business drivers, internal and external, and building an organisation that is fit-for-purpose to succeed in this environment. |
If
you answered:
’A’, well, sort of;
‘B’, it’s good to keep up with the latest thinking, but
it’s a brave CEO that follows received wisdom blindly;
‘C’, bingo!
It
sounds simple, but many businesses have fallen into the trap of designing
their organisation around names in boxes. This really is the equivalent
of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic – those boxes might
be spot on, but the underlying organisation might well not be. Organisation
design is all about making form follow function, and the first requirement
of this is to assess the business environment in which you need to succeed.
Our organisation
design model – the star – illustrates that there is more to
organisation design than organisation charts.
You need to consider all of these dimensions to design a fully effective
organisation. An absence of one of the dimensions will lead to sub-optimal
design, and two or more could result in serious operational shortcomings.
You cannot expect your people to operate effectively within a new structure,
without knowing what is expected of them individually (role design), how
they are expected to work with other parts of the organisation (interface
design) and what they are being measured against (performance measures).
Then there are all the other organisational considerations – the
integrators – that are required to make an organisation "tick".
It’s not rocket science – just common sense.
As well as considering all of the dimensions of organisation design, it’s
important to follow a rigorous process for analysing the business environment,
designing a fit-for-purpose organisation, and developing an implementation
plan that will allow you to migrate to the new organisation effectively.
The process below is the one that we at Innermost customarily follow when
working with clients to design their organisations, whether for tactical
department-level changes, or as a part of strategic top-down reviews.
| 1.
Business Drivers Articulate the demands and features of the internal and external business environment – the business drivers. |
| 2.
Design principles Define design principles – statements that define what the organisation needs to do to meet the requirements of the business environment. |
| 3. High-level
design Develop the high-level design, through a series of iterative steps, to define all elements of the star. |
| 4.
Unit-level design Once high-level design is confirmed, continue to develop the lower levels of the organisation, and the design as a whole, in more detail. Again, include all dimensions of the star. |
| 5.
Implementation
planning Define the plan for migration from the current to the planned organisation, including phasing, change management considerations, stakeholder management, and communication. |
