Organization Design Challenges

Read this article for a practical look at the challenges consultants hired to redesign an organization face. The consultants did not focus on what model they should choose but more on the process or phases of the major steps in the redesign. Any company that wants to redesign its organization will face the same challenges and decision-making points. Thus, it will help to consider how the redesign is undertaken. The first step is to analyze where the organization is currently and then consider whether a new organizational model is needed or if the current one needs to be adjusted.

Key findings

Interpretation

This result reflects the fact that organization design projects are complex and unpredictable: One may not have a full overview of the activities that need to be undertaken to make the project succeed when the project commences. For this reason, it is difficult to create reliable estimates with regards to time and resources. As one respondent remarked:

[…] most projects are never just organization design. They touch at the heart of strategy, at the intersection of process, technology and people and quickly elevate the urgency / sensitivity to changes and bring to light personal wins and losses.

However, there are also other factors that may have influenced this rating. The average manager only participates in a handful of major re-designs during his or her career and may underestimate the level of effort that is required. This is reflected in the following two quotes:

Most clients want it done fast and do not recognize how much time it will take to solicit input from organizational members. They (...) downplay the importance of broader participation

This contracting step is of course dependent on the quality and accuracy of the knowledge in the system

The results partly reflect the experience level of the practitioner him/herself. We found that there was a negative correlation (r = − .18, p = < 0.05) between the number of projects completed and the rating of this particular challenge. In other words, more experienced practitioners are somewhat less likely to rate this as a frequent challenge on their projects compared to less experienced practitioners. We would speculate that more experienced consultants not only have better skills with regards to scoping a project, but that they also have more leverage to convince the client to invest sufficient time and money in the project.

There may also be several explanations for the difficulty of finding relevant cases from comparable organizations. Worren (2018) argued that there is a lack of systematic methods for capturing key organization design variables; organizational designs are often documented in an idiosyncratic manner. Secondly, because of confidentiality concerns, detailed information about previous projects may not be made available to other teams within the consulting firm. However, even if one gains access to documents from prior projects and even if one improves how information is documented, there will always be some information (e.g., about the context, about the process used in a previous project) that is not fully captured in formal documents. Consultants may need to go and talk directly to those who participated in a prior project to understand what they did.