Wednesday, November 3, 2021

How to design your organization for success

When designing your org, there are some guidelines you should consider.

The organization needs to be designed to be:

Simple - Easy to communicate the components and the relationships with other organizations
Flexible - Able to quickly adapt to changing conditions
Accountable - A consistent predictable output with clear accountability
Economical - The benefit must outweigh the cost
Acceptable - Must offer a differentiated benefit and be accepted by employees and key stakeholders as a good fit

With these as guidelines, here are the steps to designing an organization for success.

  1. Define your team’s purpose, mission, winning aspiration and how you measure success. 
  2. Define the functions or strategy that are needed to achieve the above goal.  Ideally you can measure these functions. 
  3. Define the services and value-add to be provided.  What do the functions do? 
  4. Describe the processes needed to offer these services and calculate total workload for required tasks. 
  5. Outline handoffs and connecting mechanisms to other organizations. 
  6. Define the organization (leveling, headcount, skill mix, etc.) needed to deliver these services. 
  7. Plan and execute the creation of the organization, sequencing communications and aligning talent to roles.  This is where you will know what HC or skillset gaps you have.  

An often-overlooked factor to consider when making decisions

The factor I want to talk about today is time.  Think about the decisions you made recently whether they be for work or personal.  How often...