Case Study: Organization Architecture and Design
Situation:
A director of a department was consistently asking their executive leader to add more staff to his team. When the executive leader would inquire about what the resources would do, the response from the director was “more of what we are currently doing”. The executive wasn’t satisfied with this response and requested an organizational architecture and design review.
Approach:
Direct Effect Solutions began the engagement with a discovery process to understand the current state of operations within the department. This discovery included a thorough review of existing documents, one-on-one interviews and observations to understand the day-to-day utilization of existing resources. DES also met with the director and the executive to understand the future needs and expectations of work production from the department. From these activities and discussions, it was determined that some existing resources had skills that were underutilized, some resources needed skill development and some skills were missing completely from the current capabilities of the organization. As a result, DES recommended a new organizational structure, new skill development plans for existing team members, process improvements to increase utilization of existing systems and tools and cross-training plans in addition to recruitment for new positions.
Results:
Identification of an optimized structure to increase utilization of existing staff as well as the position descriptions for the added staff needed to become a high-performing department.