Restructure to improve customer responsiveness and project delivery

The Approach

Our aim was to maximise staff engagement in the process, ensure that they understood why the restructuring was necessary, and help them to embed the new structure in their daily operations. We did this by taking the following steps:

• Identified staff morale issues and the psychological response to potential changes, through focus groups
• Understand the major variations in project outcomes and gaps in key relationships through interviews with key internal customers
• Completed a best practice survey of how comparable organisations structured their technology project functions. This confirmed both a diverse range of organisational structures, and also that there was no one-size-fits-all model
• Development of three alternative structures, a business case and the customer implications for each, for consultation with staff
• Facilitation of staff planning workshops: aim here was both to present these structures for discussion, also for senior managers to propose the final adopted structure and to explain how it addressed staff concerns.

The Outcome

• Staff understood the need for restructure and why their Group had to become more commercially focused.
• Senior management gained an awareness of the problems posed by the current restructuring plan
• Staff identified changes that delivered improved response to customers.
• Total staff engagement and ownership of restructure; a turning point in the change program and expressed greater confidence in the process 
• Managers and staff developed a transition plan to implement changes, including
  • a communication strategy for internal customers,
  • a skills development plan with a strong mentoring focus,
  • changes to document procedures and
  • an approach to capture intellectual and tacit knowledge

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