What better assignment than to design an organisation. These are the projects that really get me going. They are the closest opportunity that management consultants get to actually building something other than slides.
Over the years, I have had the good fortune to help with some pretty cool re-org/org design projects:
- Designing the entire business unit for a biotech company that was entering a therapeutic area outside of their existing capabilities
- Designing the customer-facing team for a new product launch
- Designing the organisational footprint and supporting processes for an affiliate launch in a new geography
- Redesigning the organisational structure of an otherwise successful company for a future marked with patent-expiries, new competitive launches and an ever-changing customer landscape
Without fail, I have begun every one of these engagements with enough idealism to start with a blank sheet of paper; a real bottom-up, outside-in approach. What does the customer need and then how do we design our organisation to meet those needs? Without fail, however, factors come into play that eventually take us from the ideal to the compromised. Take your pick: budget limitations, political appointments, shared resource horse-trading, span of control controls, geographic constraints of existing personnel, or being confronted with the reality that when the client said “innovative” they actually meant “can we please just do what everyone else is doing?”
I have also been a strong advocate of not placing names in org chart boxes until the structure is agreed upon. We wouldn’t influence what’s best for the business around people who are increasingly elusive resources or design the wrong role around someone’s skillset or proclivities. The minute an org chart is drawn, your clients are placing names in those boxes, making sure there is a box for them (and many boxes below them).
Another dashed illusion of organisational design is everyone’s favourite compromise: the dotted line. I’d die on my sword for this one. Avoid dotted lines. Shared resources don’t work. All that you have achieved is pacifying someone’s budgetary request by halving a headcount and giving some fortuitous employee the free option to not do half of their job because they are “too busy” on the other half let alone creating confusion of what’s really important, navigating the push and pull of alliances and ultimately wondering who is actually responsible for managing the assigned task.
Any really good consulting engagement like org design wouldn’t be complete without its hurdles and frustrations, but here’s some advice I would give to my more seasoned self and any other management consultant lucky enough to partake in such a project:
1. Start with the customer. That’s why you’re doing this.
2. Exhaust the research and don’t stop until you get mind-numbing repetition.
3. Get the facts on what the competitors are doing. Size, structure, etc. Your clients will want to know.
4. In light of hard-core customer insights, reassess the client’s appetite for change in the light of day and not the courting phase of the pitching process.
5. After looking outside, examine what’s going on inside the organisation
- Who are the golden children?
- Who needs a new home?
- What are the practical budget constraints that might get in the way of my Westworld-esc ideas for innovating the sales force?
6. Still start with the blank sheet. Go for it. Just know you’ll unduly be influenced by who’s paying your bill. Funny how the project sponsors usually end up on that org chart.
7. Show how the current organisation needs to migrate to that future state. This is the step that I admittedly have missed from time to time. Without this step, organisations do what they do best and let momentum take over and changes become incremental at best.
8. Show the names in boxes. Like it or not, your client has already done this. Might as well participate in this step.
Good luck and should you need some assistance drawing rectangles on blank pieces of paper, give me a call.
