Organisation Design, specifically IT Organisation Design, has been one of our flagship products for the past 16 years. It made sense, when Agility, and Business Agility, started to become popular, for us to rethink how organisations could be designed to maximise their Agility.
The concept of the Reconfigurable Organisation was introduced by Jay Galbraith in his 2016 paper on “Designing a Reconfigurable Organisation”. In this paper Galbraith states “Every company needs an organisation which changes as quickly as its business changes. If not, the company is falling behind. In order to keep from falling behind, many companies are devoting enormous amounts of time and energy in “Change Management”. This change task can be made less difficult and less time-consuming if some of the change effort focused on designing organisations from the outset to be more easily changeable.” He asks the question “If change is constant, why not design our organisations to be constantly and quickly changeable?”
We took up the challenge and have created a process that helps design a reconfigurable organisation, without losing the other important aspects of organisation design, such as:
- Alignment with strategy
- A focus on creating competitive advantage
- A focus on core, value-creating work
- Identifying whole units of work and striving to keep them as whole as possible
- Ability to attract, retain, motivate, and coordinate the talent needed
- Design work for engagement
Our process includes the following steps. The entire process can be iterative as each “experiment” is tested and possible new data is input.
If you would like to know more about how we can assist to define a Reconfigurable Organisation for your organisation, either complete the form below and we will be in touch directly, or set up an appointment to discuss your needs with Gail Sturgess.
See also Work, Role and Competency Definition and Profiling and Career Path Design and Implementation.