Business reorganisation: delivering successful organisational transformation
Changes to the business model, performance improvement, growth, integrating an acquisition, digitalisation or changing job roles: organisations regularly need to adapt their structure to stay aligned with their priorities.
But changing an organisation chart is not enough. A business reorganisation involves rethinking responsibilities, ways of working, decision-making processes and sometimes job roles themselves, while taking into account teams’ actual capacity to absorb change.
Alixio Group supports business leaders in designing and implementing organisational transformations. Our Human by Design approach links the design of the target organisation, from the outset, with the human and managerial conditions it needs to succeed.
When should you rethink your organisation?
An organisation becomes less effective when it no longer fits the company’s strategy, activities or constraints.
The symptoms can vary considerably:
- unclear responsibilities;
- slow decision-making;
- too many interfaces;
- siloed ways of working;
- difficulties executing strategy;
- an accumulation of transformation projects that teams can no longer absorb.
The challenge is to distinguish what genuinely relates to organisational design from what is driven by processes, management, skills or culture.
This analysis avoids reorganising for its own sake and focuses efforts on the changes that will make a real difference to performance.
How do you design a target organisation aligned with strategy?
Organisational transformation starts by translating the company’s ambitions into concrete choices about how it will operate.
Start with strategy
Translate the company’s ambitions into organisational and operating principles
Analyse the current organisation
Identify friction points, interactions between functions and the limitations of the current model
Design the target organisation
Define responsibilities, decision-making levels, interfaces, processes and ways of working together
Prepare implementation
Ensure the organisation remains realistic, understandable and something teams can take ownership of
Depending on the project, this work may also cover changes to job roles and the skills the new organisation will need.
Choosing and sequencing transformations
Organisations now have to manage several transformations simultaneously: changing business models, digitalisation, artificial intelligence, new employee expectations and regulatory developments.
The aim is not to launch ever more transformation programmes, but to prioritise the most useful changes and set a pace that matches the organisation’s capacity to absorb them. This helps build a realistic transformation roadmap that connects strategic ambition with the practical conditions for implementation.
Capital Transformation©: assessing the organisation’s capacity to transform
Alixio Group regards an organisation’s capacity to transform as a strategic asset.
Our proprietary Capital Transformation© approach assesses this capacity, identifies the barriers and levers for change specific to the organisation, and determines the conditions needed for transformations to succeed.
In particular, it helps inform trade-offs between business impact, level of ambition, pace and transformation capacity, so that the roadmap reflects the organisation’s reality.
How do you turn a target organisation into day-to-day reality?
A new organisation only becomes effective when responsibilities, decisions and working practices genuinely change on the ground. That is why implementation must be considered from the very start of the project.
Clarify roles
Translate the target organisation into clear responsibilities and decision-making levels
Adapt processes
Adapt processes to the new ways of working
Structure interfaces and governance
Structure interactions between teams and define how the transformation will be monitored and managed
Test and adjust
Test the model against operational reality and adjust it where necessary
Designing transformation with our Human by Design approach
Organisational transformation does not succeed simply because the target organisation looks right on paper. It must also be understood, embraced and implemented by the people who will make it work.
This is the principle behind our Human by Design approach: integrating the human and managerial dimensions from the design stage, rather than addressing them only once decisions have been made.
We therefore work simultaneously on the target organisation and the conditions for its success:
- clarity of responsibilities;
- decision-making practices;
- cooperation between teams;
- management practices;
- employees’ ability to adapt their ways of working.
Managers play a central role in this approach. They are not simply responsible for communicating the transformation: they help translate it into day-to-day operations and pass on the adjustments needed from the front line.
Managing transformation as close to operations as possible
An organisational transformation inevitably evolves when it comes up against the realities of the business.
Oversight needs to track implementation, identify bottlenecks and make quick decisions when some of the initial choices need to be adapted.
Alixio Group supports leadership teams and project teams in moving from roadmap to execution, combining organisation, management, performance and human factors.
Our involvement can therefore begin at a very early stage, when the target model is first being defined, and continue until new ways of working are fully embedded across the organisation.
Transforming the organisation without losing sight of performance
A reorganisation is not an end in itself. It should help the company execute its strategy more effectively, run more smoothly and strengthen its ability to evolve over time.
Alixio Group helps you design an organisation aligned with your ambitions, define a realistic transformation roadmap and implement it with your managers and teams.
