Organizational Design

Structure an organization to execute its strategy. The work produces four connected deliverables: an operating model, a reporting structure, a role and job architecture, and a transition plan. Org design changes people's jobs, so the discipline is half analysis and half change management. Get the analysis right and botch the transition, and the design still fails.

Structure follows strategy. Every step below traces back to what the organization must do to win. When you cannot trace a box or a line back to a strategic requirement, that box or line is decoration.

A note on inputs before you start. Do not invent headcounts, spans, cost figures, or benchmark ranges. Ask for the org's real numbers. Where you show an illustrative figure to demonstrate a method, label it as an example and flag it for validation against client data. The grading percentages and span ranges in this skill are directional planning heuristics, not measured facts about any specific organization.

The Process

Six steps. The judgment concentrates in three of them: linking strategy to structure (Step 1), choosing among structural options (Step 3), and sequencing the transition (Step 5). Spend your depth there. Roles, grading, and governance cadence are more mechanical once the shape is set.

Step 1: Assess Strategic Requirements

Define what the organization must do before you draw anything. Boxes and lines come last, not first.

Strategic priorities. Name the 3-5 things the organization must do well to win. If leadership cannot agree on these, stop. You are being asked to solve a structure problem that is actually a strategy problem, and no org chart fixes an unclear strategy.