Reorganization Best Practices

This is the third installment in a 4 part series on reorganization. The first Is Reorganization your Right Solution? covers the impact and decision making behind reorganizing your group. The second blog Okay, You’ve Made the Decision to Reorganize, Now What? lays out the process for designing and implementing the reorganization.

As you work through your organization design and implementation planning, consider the below lessons learned and how you can incorporate them into your reorganization efforts. These are based on what has worked well for me as I have consulted on or led reorganization efforts. They are simple and pretty straightforward, yet you might be surprised by the number of times these key lessons are omitted from reorganization plans.

• Sponsorship matters – Active, engaged sponsorship from the leader over the duration of the change is essential to success

• Plan more time in the design phase allowing your team to thoroughly vet strategy, customer feedback and design options. This will pay dividends during implementation

• Invest in key roles of Organization Design, Communication, Change Management and Human Resources. Make these resources available full time to the reorganization effort

• Identify and test any assumptions made during the design phase. The later that disagreements on assumptions are surfaced, the higher the likelihood of impact to implementation and timelines

• When possible, design the new organization with the involvement of the new leadership team. This improves the overall quality of decisions, minimizes resistance to and improves adoption of the changes.

• Establish measures to show progress to your target audience and to management

• Reinforce the change to provide motivation and demonstrate continued intent

There could be a whole series of articles about this list of practices alone. Each bullet point on its own is very important. Taken together with a solid legitimate decision for conducting the reorganization and process for design and implementation, you have a recipe for a very successful initiative.

These best practices are easy to implement. Some, such as sponsorship and involving the leadership team are done quite regularly. The items that tend to get short changed are establishing measures, setting aside more time in the design phase and investing in key roles. These items may be overlooked because they take more time and resources, but putting more time in the design up front, resourcing your initiative appropriately and measuring and reporting on progress are vitally important.

Continue following the series to the final installment, Alternatives to Reorganization.

Is there anything you would like to add? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.