Organisation design

Is your business set up in the best way possible to achieve its goals for 2022? If this is not absolutely clear, then an in depth assessment of your organisation design will help.

Organisation design is the way that structure, roles, capability, and resources are deployed within a business to deliver a strategy. It is the formal system of accountability that defines key positions and enables the efficient allocation of resources to enable success.

This requires a systematic and structured approach, aligning all interdependent components of an organisation before completing the design. Organisation design projects that focus purely on structure and process can fail, because they do not take into account talent, performance and the cultural elements of an organisation.

For the design to be sustainable, it should be regularly reviewed to ensure that it is ‘fit for purpose’ and meets the strategic objectives of the firm.

The key elements of your organisation design should be:

Structure: this should be streamlined and responsive with appropriate spans of control and management layers.

Roles: There should be clear roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, and indicative performance metrics throughout.

Resources: FTE and headcount requirements should be defined to deliver superior performance.

Capability: Capability requirements should be matched to the right roles and appropriate learning and development targets.

• There should be well defined high-level operational processes and strong linkages and communications between functions, and effective mechanisms for making decisions and reducing bureaucracy.
• Your infrastructure (systems and property) should support the requirements of your design.
• You should ensure you have talent management and leadership development strategies to support the business vision and strategy.
• Your performance measurement should drive behaviours that are aligned to the business vision and strategy, and the organisation’s culture and behaviours should be aligned to core values and consistent throughout the organisation.

The complexity of an organisation design project dictates which specific activities should be completed and what level of governance is required.

When assessing the complexity of an organisation design project, consider the functions or divisions impacted, number of people impacted, the types of roles impacted, the cost of the project, the size of the benefits and the political profile.

The graph below shows the relative complexity of organisation design projects dependent on scale of the change required.

If you are considering setting up your business for future success and would like an initial discussion free of charge to set you on the right track, then please get in touch with Ballards LLP.