Organisation Design reflects the process of shaping the way organisations are structured and operated. It involves many different aspects, such as department or team formations, lines of reporting, and decision-making structures. When organisations are designed in a way that aligns with the organisations’ core strategies, the structures, processes, and people will help to achieve those strategies.
Why Organisational Design?
In today’s world, tremendous pressures are forcing organisations to redesign. Larger societal topics, such as climate change, global economic changes, digitalisation, personnel shortages, and ageing put pressure on organisations at an increasing speed. Organisations must constantly redesign themselves to have a viable business model in the future. Whether it is a small adaptive redesign or a large transformation, to succeed and grow in an ever-changing business world the success and growth of an organisation depends on the ability to adapt.
For instance, in the Netherlands, due to high shortages in mechanical engineering personnel, organisations within the energy sector are forced to use their capacity more efficient. This requires them to reshape their strategy and redesign their organisation in such a way that people with operational skills spend limited time on administrative tasks. Besides, COVID-19 has prompted organisations to redesign themselves even faster. Organisations have embraced technology and data in order to respond to the pandemic, redesigning core processes and implementing new collaboration tools.
However, most organisations find it hard to transform themselves. From our experience, we see that organisations may design their strategies successfully, but often fail to design the organisation accordingly. As individuals already find it hard to change, it therefore takes a lot of change management, time and effort on organisational level to change entire departments or business units. Hence, organisation design is crucial in ensuring that a new strategy fits well with how an organisation is structured. Professional organisation design can boost employee engagement, enhance decisiveness, and ensure that the organisation is designed in such a way that it is ready for future challenges and becomes fit for purpose.
The BearingPoint Organisational Design Toolkit
We, as BearingPoint, help organisations in designing their organisation successfully. Based on our client experiences and in-depth research, we have developed our Organisational Design Toolkit. The Organisational Design Toolkit is an approach that helps organisations in designing, implementing, and maintaining an effective organisational structure. By doing so, we help organisations focus on organisational drivers and capabilities that are required for an organisation to have a viable business model in the future. Using our toolkit could result in a large-scale reorganisation (re-design), but also in more subtle shifts in structures and systems to ensure that an organisation continues to thrive. Ultimately, our Toolkit aims that organisations design their structures in such a way that the organisation is able to adapt adequately to the various pressures they are confronted with.
The Benefits
To begin with, the toolkit brings our clients a clear structure and a uniform way of approaching organisational (re)design. Based on prior client experiences, we identified similarities and best practices. By using the Organisational Design Toolkit, we take the full scope of organisation design into account during the design and change process.
Furthermore, the Organisational Design Toolkit allows us to perform all steps in collaboration with our clients. Together, through an iterative process of workshops, interview sessions, and collaborative management team meetings, we identify the organisation’s current and desired state, which capabilities are necessary to achieve this desired state, and which capabilities still need to be developed. By doing so, we ensure that our clients understand every step of the change process and that the change is supported by all the people in the organisation.
Finally, our approach offers a lot of transparency as we work closely with our clients, and provide insights into the next steps in the organisational design process.
How it works
The BearingPoint Organisational Design Toolkit consists out of a six-step approach which can be executed in full or partially depending on the organisational needs.
1. Understand Current State (AS-IS)
In the first step, we help our client by understanding the external as well as internal environment. This helps us to grasp and identify an organisation’s mission, vision, and strategy.
2. Define Desired State (TO-BE)
In the second step, we help organisations by capturing their purpose to know where the organisation wants to be in the future. An organisation’s purpose can be updated and modified if the organisation changes its focus. In this step, we design the key capabilities an organisation needs for its desired state.
3. Measure and Analyse Fit
In the third step, we use a systematic gap analysis to determine if, and to which extent, the organisation is in line with its desired target state. This provides input for the design roadmap, in which core business functions will be grouped, prioritised, and mapped over time.
4. Improve the Operating Model
In the fourth step, we help clients by iteratively improving their operating model. An operating model is a visualisation (model) of how an organisation delivers value to its customers. A good operating model provides a unified, holistic, and comprehensive view of how value is added as an organisation or business unit. When improving the operating model, we determine the high-over processes, and the high-level organisational structure by iteratively identifying archetypes, evaluating synergy, customising archetypes, and defining design principles. During this iterative process, we determine how the operating model should look like together with the client.
5. Design the Organisation
In the fifth step, we help organisations in designing their organisation. Together with the client, we define departments & teams, positions & roles, the right size, and the government structure.
6. Implement the design
In the last step, we help our clients by implementing the design and transforming the organisation. Part of this is determining an HR sourcing plan and a strategic workforce analysis. This is also where organisational development comes in, to assure that the change is well-embedded in the organisation.
Want to know more?
We have supported multiple companies with redesigning their organisation and preparing them for the required and/or desired change. Want to know more about how we support companies that consider organisational redesign and how we can help them in successfully achieving this? Please contact us or request a quick scan of your organisation. During a quick scan, we perform a scan in two weeks to identify organisational design improvement potential.
