Intensive workshop · Strategy
The org chart and the real company
Nobody designed the structure you have now. It accumulated, one hire and one half-finished reorganization at a time.
- Duration
- 4 hours
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 8 to 25 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
The org chart of almost any mid-sized company describes an intention somebody had a few years ago. Between that drawing and today there were hires made to solve an emergency, a department that split in two and merged back, and duties picked up by whoever was free at the time and never taken off them since.
The real structure shows up elsewhere: in who gets asked when something that matters has to be decided. Three patterns appear there. Decisions two people both consider theirs, which therefore get made twice or not at all. Responsibilities with no owner, visible only when they fail, at which point the owner settles them with a phone call. And one mid-level role everything passes through, not because of rank but because that person remembers the history, whose week away stops three departments.
Until that is looked at, any reorganisation is an exercise in boxes. Titles and reporting lines change on the diagram while the work keeps taking the same shortcuts it took before, now under new names. And the day somebody resigns, the company discovers all at once how much of how it runs was never written down anywhere.
What it covers
The day does not start with drawing. It starts by reconstructing the structure the company already has, from two sources rarely consulted for this purpose: the decisions actually taken over recent weeks and who really took them, and the path of an order or a case from arrival to delivery. What comes out almost never matches the current chart, and the gaps between the two are the working material for the rest of the day.
Against that map the group identifies duplicated responsibilities, orphaned ones, and those shared without any explicit agreement. Each needs a different remedy: the duplicated one gets assigned, the orphan gets placed, the shared one needs someone named as the decider and someone named as consulted. Spans of control come next, and they are not a universal number but a consequence of the work being supervised. How many people one role can carry changes entirely depending on whether the work is repetitive and stable or different every time and full of judgement calls.
The central block is comparative. Participants build two or three structural options for their own company, organised by function, by process or by market, and weigh them against the same criteria: what problem each one solves, what problem it creates, and what it charges in coordination cost. That cost is made visible by counting meetings, handovers and the number of people who must agree before anything moves. Scenario analysis then tests each option against real situations, including the unplanned departure of a key person.
The day ends on the transition, which is where most well-designed reorganisations come apart. The group orders the stages, decides what is communicated at each one, to whom and in what order, and which individual conversations have to happen before any general announcement is made.
What participants learn
- Rebuild the company's real structure from decisions taken and work flow rather than from the current chart.
- Identify duplicated, orphaned and informally shared responsibilities.
- Size spans of control against the kind of work each area supervises.
- Compare two or three structural options by coordination cost and by the problem each one solves.
- Plan the transition sequence and what gets communicated at each stage.
Agenda
- Declared structure and actual structure: where they diverge
- Designing from decisions before designing from titles
- Duplicated, orphaned and shared responsibilities
- Spans of control: how many people one role can supervise, and for what work
- Coordination cost: what every extra reporting line charges in time
- Functional, process and market structures: the problem each one solves
- Transition sequence and what to say at each stage
What the organisation leaves with
- A map of the company's real structure, built from decisions and work flow.
- A list of duplicated, orphaned or ambiguous responsibilities, each with a proposed assignment.
- Two or three structural options compared by coordination cost and by the problem each one solves.
- A staged transition sequence, with the content and order of what gets communicated at each step.
Programme details
- Format
- Intensive workshop
- Also available as
- Workshop · Corporate training day
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Managing directors weighing a reorganization.
- Management teams whose areas either overlap or ignore each other.
- Companies that outgrew the structure they started with.
Frequently asked questions
- Do we leave with the new org chart decided?
- No, and it is better to say so before you book. A structure is decided with information that does not fit in one session: commitments to particular people, what each candidate can actually carry, where the business stands. What you leave with is the diagnosis, the compared options and the transition sequence.
- Should the management team take part if the reorganisation affects them?
- Usually yes, on one condition: that leadership is not arriving with the decision already made and using the session as scenery. If the outcome is fixed, it is more honest to work in a small group first and communicate afterwards.
- Does it help a family business where roles follow the family?
- It helps you see the structure clearly, which is already a great deal. The day does not settle family agreements and does not substitute for that conversation. It separates which decisions the operation requires from which positions exist for reasons of kinship, and that distinction is usually where the work starts.
- Can it be applied to a single department rather than the whole company?
- Yes, and that is a sensible way to begin when the problem is localised. The limitation is worth knowing: orphaned responsibilities tend to live on the borders between departments, so a single-department exercise will find fewer of them than actually exist.
Request this programme
Tell us the context and we will prepare a proposal tailored to your organisation. No obligation.
Working this inside the organisation
If this challenge will not be settled in one session, ALUD Consulting LLC works it as consulting: management consulting, human resources, strategy, organisational design, leadership development and business transformation.