Organization design principles pdf

In these situations, part of an org design is to rationalize the number and scope of roles and positions. Not only does role rationalization lead to a more efficient and effective organization, but also typically leads to more growth potential for individuals by providing them with a clearly defined and achievable career path, more mentors, and more standardized training and support.

When designing a new role or redesigning an existing role, the ROLES framework below helps set up individual roles for success. Most individuals in a company role up to permanent or temporary teams. Creating, evangelizing and living by the team charter supports a team's success and member satisfaction. The last element of org design is cross-functional excellence. Siloed organizations can be highly political, strategically misaligned, and cross-functionally inefficient.

What defines cross-functional excellence is the level of coordination, circulation, and collaboration. Cross-functional best practices are typically pragmatic and simple.

First, define and expose functional processes, so that anyone can easily understand how best to work with a function or team. Also, establish and manage well-defined cross-functional processes. Moreover, focus on ways to better connect people across the organization through a directory or social networking platform, rotational management programs, all-company events and communications, interest groups, cross-functional project teams, and other ideas.

An org design strategy project can drive substantial positive change while improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. Any org design strategy project involves four basic steps, including baseline, design, plan and execute.

The details of each step are outlined below. Org design should always be informed by and architected to support the broader business model strategies. Given the potential expansiveness of org design, most companies don't try to take on all eight elements of org design at once, instead prioritizing the areas to go after.

This is a prudent approach since org design changes are challenging, given you are asking many individuals to change their daily behaviors and processes. Too often leadership teams abstract org design to an exercise of moving boxes on a PowerPoint presentation. Good org design focuses more on how to holistically elevate, better circulate and align all of the human energy and potential that fuels the growth of every successful company.

If you would like to talk to an expert about your org strategy, set up a free, no-hassle minute coaching session. To get you started on creating a strong org design, download the free PowerPoint, which includes: 1.

Core Competency Template 2. Org Structure Template 4. Team Charter - Strategic Alignment 5. You should solve org design after the other business model strategies. Too much change to org design is difficult for organizations to digest.

Organizing Principles. Organizational Framing. Reporting Structure. Individual Roles. Team Strategy. Cross Functional Excellence. Book some time with Joe Newsum , the creator of Stratechi.

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Competency in organization design leadership is built not only on principles but also complementary skill-sets, personal development, and practice. If you believe your organization has design opportunities, conservative advice is to contact a specialist in the field.

You are looking for help among those who have a coherent set of organization design principles and experience applying them to real work. The benefit is a much higher probability for a successful design outcome. These principles define a path for leaders like you who require a different organization from the one you experience today. It is helpful to temporarily set aside the term organization design in favor of system change. The former frequently conjures images of box charts and dividing the organization according to some internal logic.

System change is what you're really managing when designing an organization. Because of this, there are principles that focus on the design process itself. The first organization design principle is that the process must be compatible with its objectives.

If your higher-level objective is a participative, responsive, and knowledgeable workforce then your design process must reflect this intention. If, on the other hand, you are satisfied with an organization that waits for direction, works to order, and is slow to change, then traditional, top-down, expert-driven approaches to design will satisfy your interests. We can predict design effectiveness and implementation success not so much by some objective quality of the design, but by employees' ability to see their ideas in the design.

Therefore, we must be careful to avoid over-specifying how work will be done in the new design. We can be quite precise about what must be done in the form of setting minimum critical specifications while designing no more than is necessary. We call this designing to minimum critical specifications.

Organizations that are externally responsive and internally adaptable are populated with people who have more complete views of the full system. An organization design principle is to foster as much wall-to-wall system awareness and network connectivity as possible through the design process itself. Your organization is not a machine whose parts are fixed in form and function. Rather, it is viewable as a living system capable of adapting to changing environmental demands if the design and design process establishes proper conditions.

Every organization exists to turn inputs into outputs. The process of conversion is called the value chain. Simply put, the conversion process has steps that are performed in some discernible sequence. Design to accommodate the work. Here are associated principles:. A variance is any "unprogrammed" event in inputs, process, or outputs.

Much of the design of management layers such as supervision and inspection is intended to control or eliminate variance. When we separate this activity in time, place, or job from the conditions that created the variance we limit learning and create unnecessary delay as we export the issue up and across the organization.

Thus, a good organization design principle is to enable an organization to manage variance as close to the source of the variance as possible. Creating organizational boundaries is an unavoidable aspect of design.

A notable disadvantage to boundaries is the way they interfere with sharing knowledge, experience, and cooperation. The more we separate whole systems of work through boundaries, the more inefficient, error-prone, and dysfunctional organizations can become. Therefore, it is good practice to identify whole units of work and strive to keep them as whole as possible when defining organizational boundaries. The information systems that operate within an organization should be designed to deliver information to the point where action can be taken based on the information.

A work team with the right information can manage its variances within the team and avoid exporting the issue across organizational boundaries.

Your organization is best viewed as a system of both technical and human dimension. Recognize both and design your organization such that these aspects fit together.

Ideally, your design team will include members with technical expertise in the value chain. Do not allow them to work alone.