Most operating models were built for a scale the business has already passed. Work moves through functions that no longer match how the organization actually delivers, so general operations, people and HR teams end up solving the same problems separately. A restructure changes the org chart without changing the work. What follows is duplicated effort, decisions no one clearly owns, and capable teams spending their week on administration instead of the business.
What we usually hear
We reorganized last year and the same problems came back.
Our operations team and our people team are solving the same problem separately.
Nobody can tell me who actually owns this decision.
HR spends the week on administration instead of the business.
We have a target operating model on a slide, but nothing changed in how the work runs.
Every project needs the same three people, so everything queues behind them.
If two or three of these sound familiar, the work below is where we would start.
Key solutions
Map how work moves across the business today, find where ownership breaks, and design the target structure with the process and technology that hold it in place.
Redesign the people and HR function itself. Service delivery model, role design, systems and data, so the team supports the business instead of absorbing it.
Implement the redesign through to stabilization, with governance cadence, dependency tracking and reporting your executive team can act on. We work inside your teams.
Framework
Expected business outcomes
Proof points
Published third-party research. These figures describe the market, not FT Consulting Partners results.
Most transformation programs do not deliver what was approved.
Seven in ten large-scale programs miss the goals set out in the business case. The money is spent and the program is closed, but the operating result the board signed off never arrives.
Source: McKinsey & Company7 of 10 programs fall short of their stated goals
The strongest predictor is how well the people side is managed.
Prosci benchmarked change management effectiveness against project results. Programs with excellent change management were seven times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. The gap is larger than any technology variable.
Source: Prosci benchmarkingFrom 2014, Microsoft reorganized around a cloud-first strategy under Satya Nadella. The reorganization is widely studied because the structural change was paired with a publicly stated change to how performance and collaboration were managed, including the retirement of stack-ranked performance reviews announced in late 2013.
The relevance here is sequencing. Structure, incentives and the way people were assessed changed as one programme rather than as separate initiatives with separate owners. That is the pattern this practice is built around.
Send a short brief describing the situation. We respond with an approach, the team who would deliver it, and the measures we report against.
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