Organization design is one of the most potent tools available to senior managers for shaping the direction of their organizations. It can be a key leverage point for directing attention and energy to certain critical activities in an organization. It matches people, information, and technology to the purpose and strategy of an organization and it connects people with each other in meaningful and purposeful ways. An organization structure defines the formal relationships among people and specifies both their roles and their responsibilities.
The ultimate design of an organization should be whatever structure best helps the organization to achieve its goals. The need to restructure is typically caused by changes in leadership, a shift in strategy, changing factors within an organization or changing industry dynamics. Whatever the case, senior managers are constantly facing the need to restructure their organizations.
Our Experience
Our experience working with retailers, guiding their restructuring efforts, is extensive. We have developed corporate infrastructures, category management, procurement, merchandising, marketing, advertising, store operations and support structures. Category management organizational design experience includes grocery, dairy/frozen, meat, bakery, produce, merchandising support and private label.
Our Approach
Our approach to organization design involves a four-phase step-by-step process for examining the structure of an organization.
The four-phases are as follows:
The situational assessment involves the collection of information necessary for making design decisions. We conduct interviews across all levels and functions of the organization. These interviews focus on the strategy of the organization, roles, responsibilities, spans of control, staffing, key tasks being performed and alignment of performance measures. We identify current strengths and opportunities for improvement.
The purpose of the strategic design phase is to develop organization structure concepts that best support the strategy and basic work of the organization. During this phase we confirm design criteria. By design criteria we mean statements about what the new design will need to be able to do. These statements are reflections of the organization's strategy, its basic tasks, and the current strengths and weaknesses identified during the situational assessment. We then develop several different design alternatives, each assessed against the design criteria. At this point a final design is selected. Often the final design is a hybrid of several alternatives considered during the process.
The operational design phase involves structuring the new organization, in detail, within the context of the agreed upon final design.
Implementation involves managing the transition from the current organization design to the new organizational design. This frequently involves a phased implementation from the current state, through a series of transitions to reach the final desired state.
3rd Party Facilitation and Design Guidance is Essential
Organizational leaders often lack the tools or industry perspective necessary to help them in making decisions about how to structure their organizations. Decisions to reorganize are often made with insufficient information and without a clear process to guide the effort. The result is that reorganizations often fail to produce the desired results, leading instead to further confusion or problems within the organization.
Our extensive experience in organization design and business process facilitation, combined with our “real world “management experience in the retail industry, ideally qualifies WWA to be the consulting firm you select to redesign your organization Our client’s experience considerable benefits when we are involved in all aspects of the process…facilitation, design and implementation. They typically enjoy…
- A well-aligned, flexible and productive organization
that is able to meet the demands of a shifting market place
- A culture of accountability
- Improved employee satisfaction
- Improved customer satisfaction.
- Improved financial performance
- Improved competitive advantage
- Significant return on investment
WWA is your “insurance policy” to delivering desired organization design outcomes.
