Organization Design & Operating Models

Structural and operational change is necessary to keep an organization healthy. The need for change may be driven by an event, such as reorganizing to align around new services, markets, or capabilities, or an M&A transaction (or set of transactions) or divestiture. Alternatively, a restructure could arise from a recognized need to pull together a fragmented organization to leverage all of the skills and capabilities in your organization. In any case, your organization’s structure is a foundational element to support your strategy, and when done well, it ensures that every component of your business is working in the same direction – providing agility, focus, and clarity and aligning all team members on your collective success.

Avoid Common Organization Design Pitfalls

Our job is to understand humans, and that’s the edge we bring to organizational and operational design. Too often we see clients who worked with firms to create a new org design only to be left with the same operational challenges as before. The org charts looked great, but the people were lost without an understanding of the required behavior, capabilities, workflow, hand-offs, and necessary adjustments to support and solidify new ways of working.

Organization Design that Accounts for Real People, Process, and Capability

The LEVATA approach takes the design off paper and into the realities of how your people work. For example, one of our clients felt they weren’t getting the expected share of their market, only to discover their operating model was incentivizing internal competition. We resolved this through a new design that properly aligned incentives to create collaboration instead of competition.

A design can even be aspirational in that it takes a few iterations to get there, and we help clients through that journey. This is often the case when capabilities need to be built internally to move the organization along the maturity path. One client was a finance department needing a total makeover: from being seen as a reactionary compliance driver to a strategic business partner. Together we developed a business partner model that included capability development and process improvement to get the organization to where they wanted to be over a period of time.

In the end, you get the behavior you incent, and you can’t truly activate a new organizational or operational structure without the proper incentives and integrating mechanisms in place. Our goal is not only to produce a good design, but one that can be successfully implemented and that will bring the value it is supposed to bring to the organization.