What Does an Organizational Design Consultant Do?
An organizational design consultant helps a company determine how people, work, and decisions should be organized to deliver its strategy. The work may produce a new organizational chart, but the chart is only one part of the answer.
A useful design clarifies what each team owns, how work moves between teams, who has authority to make decisions, what capabilities the business needs, and how leaders will measure performance.
What does the consultant examine?
An organizational design engagement usually begins with the business goals and its current operating reality. The consultant may interview leaders and employees, review financial and performance data, and map important workflows from beginning to end.
The aim is to identify issues such as duplicated work, unclear ownership, slow decisions, overloaded managers, gaps in capability, or a structure that no longer supports the company’s growth. The consultant should distinguish problems caused by structure from those caused by processes, systems, or management practices.
What does the consultant design?
Depending on the problem, the work may include:
A target operating model showing how functions work together.
Clear ownership of processes, decisions, and business outcomes.
Roles, teams, reporting relationships, management layers, and spans of control.
Staffing and capability requirements.
KPIs, scorecards, and management routines.
A transition plan for moving from the current organization to the new one.
A consultant should also test the proposed organization against expected workload, capacity, cost, and business objectives. A design that looks simple on a slide still needs to work when customers call, orders arrive, and teams make daily decisions.
Does an organizational design consultant help implement the changes?
That depends on the engagement. Some firms deliver a recommended structure and leave implementation to the client. Others help leaders make role decisions, communicate changes, establish new management routines, and resolve issues as the model goes live.
Stonehill’s organizational design consulting connects these steps. Our MODERN™ methodology maps how work gets done, establishes ownership, designs the organization, identifies process and technology improvements, models the proposed structure, and supports implementation.
When is this work most valuable?
Companies often seek organizational design consulting during rapid growth, after an acquisition, before a major restructuring, or when accountability has become unclear. It is also useful when a strategy requires capabilities or coordination the current organization cannot provide.
If you are considering a redesign, begin with the result you need the organization to deliver. Stonehill can help determine which decisions require a full operating model redesign and which can be addressed through more focused changes.
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Learn more about Design Thinking: Stonehill’s guiding methodology.
