Making changes to your organisational structure might be needed for many different reasons. Perhaps your business has plateaued or fallen well below growth projections. Maybe market forces or advances in tech mean that your resources are no longer aligned to your key priorities or are the wrong size for the tasks that they need to perform.
Whatever the reasons for needing organisational structural changes, the gap between knowing things need to change and actually having a robust plan built on evidence for moving forward can be significant.
At Avocado55, we have decades of combined experience in helping organisations of all sizes and types successfully transition and transform into new organisational structures and operating frameworks. Every business is different and needs a tailored approach to help ensure that the changes implemented will bring about the desired outcomes.
Understanding how your organisation currently operates
Based on our extensive experience, we’ve compiled a checklist of fundamental questions to ask yourself about your business. This will help you to better understand how your business currently operates and provide a basis to assess your existing organisational structure against.
- What is your value proposition, in simple terms?
- Which activities are critical to the quality and delivery of what you do?
- Who performs these activities and where from?
- How are these activities measured?
- What capabilities are required for these activities?
- How are the activities supported by technology and data?
- How is the responsibility and ownership for these activities spread?
From this understanding, you can begin to discuss your company’s objectives and determine what organisational structure will be required to achieve them.
Understanding what needs to change
- Think logically about the requirements of the business, what changes are required and why? This will give a good foundation for understanding the areas that need to be optimised and the specific areas that will be most impacted.
- Prioritise the improvements and changes that need to be made. It may not be possible or advisable to do everything at once, so consider when each change is needed. You’ll need to consider not only what will have the biggest impact on the business, but also where there are dependencies between changes. Some elements of the transition will depend on others already being in place and working well.
- Consider who will be supporting the changes. Map your existing resources to the skills and capabilities needed for the changes you’d like to implement. The changes may need to be introduced over several phases and it is important to coordinate your organisational changes to the other changes being made, to ensure that they are implemented effectively.
If you’d like assistance with any element of your organisational structure changes, our team can help. Whether that’s with putting together a strong business case for change to stakeholders or running organisational reviews and mapping out the plan ahead. Contact us to see how we can help your organisation
