Organisational structure redesign for a consultancy
Unoptimised organisational structure
Organisational design can cause significant inefficiency. As a simple example, if you have three separate teams working on the same thing, you will need to manage dependencies between them. In many cases, organisations will spend a lot of effort optimising processes to achieve this. This overhead is costly and error-prone. Worse still, Conway’s Law considers the likelihood of additional technology complexity. Each team creates its own implementation and the result is a product that is structured like the organisational design.
In summary, many clients were asking for processes to be evaluated and improved. The powerful lever of organisational restructuring wasn’t always considered.
Explaining the theory
I created a slide pack to help people understand the impact of organisational design. This covered many aspects, such as aligning teams to customer journey steps, specialist teams and role definition.
Workshop design
A one-day kickoff workshop was created to start the process. The idea was to get a starting position that could be further refined. This introduced the key concepts and allowed senior leaders to discuss options.
The first run was for a very large department at a UK bank. After many detailed discussions, a potential new departmental structure was created. Constraints were also identified, particularly where key people or teams were causing bottlenecks. Some changes, such as reducing these constraints, required a long-term investment, whilst others could be made quickly. This gave the foundations for the leadership to progress to more detailed planning and rollout.
Changing the leadership’s mindset was as important as the actual change. Many organisations will restructure every few years, and the patterns can be reused.
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