Organisation redesign and team development 

 

For this project my customer was the President of a 2,000 people division. He had joined the business from an external position. He had no detailed knowledge of the organisation or the industry, but had a strong service and customer-focused background. This meant he approached the role from a significantly different perspective than previous Presidents had. 

 

The starting point was the refinement, redefinition and development of the business strategy to make significant improvements to the customer focus of the organisation. Since I was also a member of the Executive team I was directly involved in the development of the strategy from the outset. 

 

 

Once the strategy was bought off at sector level I worked with the President to design a senior management conference at which the strategy would be launched. I developed a proposal for the agenda and content of the conference and then carried out all the organisation of the conference and led the facilitation of the event. The conference was attended by the top 80 senior managers in the business and held at a unique venue I had identified. The venue cost was half that of running it at a hotel or traditional conference facility and gave direct insight into one of the key customers. The event was extremely well received and feedback was very positive from the President, my Executive team colleagues and the attendees. 

 

Following the successful launch of the strategy I moved into the next phase of the activity. This was to design and deliver an organisation aligned to the strategy in order to begin its implementation. 

 

I continued to build my understanding of the need for the organisation which I had developed from my strategy involvement and used this as the design philosophy. I produced a proposed organisation structure with first line Executive level roles and agreed the principles with the President. I then carried out detailed work on the design of the specific roles, developed the role profiles and the structure and roles of the reports into the Executive positions. Again I worked very closely with my customer in order to ensure he was fully involved, engaged and in agreement with my proposals. The next stage was to take the roles through the corporate Global Grading process which I led, and used the President for support as needed. Initially there was a lack of understanding in the corporate group of the complexity and difference in this business sector when compared to the major sector in the organisation. I reached an agreement on the Global Grades which all parties felt were justified and fair. 

 

Following Global Grading I moved into the communication activity and designed the approach to brief out the organisation structure changes and the resulting available vacancies across the business. 

 

Working with the President I designed and led the recruitment process and fully resourced the new structure at both Executive and team level and then launched the organisation. 

 

After resourcing the Executive roles and their reporting teams, some time passed for the organisation to settle into ‘business as usual’ and there was then an opportunity to hold a further senior management conference. Again I worked with the President to define the agenda and structure of the event. I suggested we use the opportunity to show some successes and positive progress following implementation of the new organisation. It was also a chance to further clarify roles and operating principles of the organisation. My customer readily accepted this proposal and I designed, organised and facilitated another highly successful conference attended by over 100 senior managers. 

 

 

I delivered a fully resourced organisation which was designed to deliver the revised business strategy on customer focus. My approach was very much a partnership and I discussed, challenged and offered alternative views and thoughts in order to achieve an outcome which my customer was extremely pleased with. The new organisation structure resulted in significant progress towards improving the way the business operated with regards to the service delivered and the customer experience. 

 

I received the following feedback from the President of the business. 

 

“Andrew was a key member of my executive team for two years when I was President, Marine Services in Singapore. He was an excellent sounding board, operated with complete integrity and I valued his support. His style is very collaborative and he gained the respect of everyone in the team during the time we worked together. Andrew has a high level of commitment, is well organised and consistently delivers. 

 

"During this time, we reorganised the Marine Services executive team into a more customer focused structure and Andrew drove the implementation through as well as working on the design of the structure and the associated roles and accountabilities. He also led the recruitment of high calibre individuals into the new positions. 

 

Andrew demonstrated his creativity and attention to detail in his design, organisation and facilitation of our annual Marine Services Conferences where we brought together the top 100 leaders of the business together. These events received extremely positive feedback from the participants.”