Organisation design

Organisation design is an important component of any process improvement or transformation programme. The design is often based on functional departments common in most organisations (sales, finance, operations, etc.). These functional "silos" are not aligned to the processes which generate value for the organisation and have limited customer focus. This results in poor accountability and fragmented responsibility. Managers of these functional silos are often valued based on the number of staff in their department rather their value contribution.

A process-oriented organisation design addressed these weaknesses. Process owners are accountable for processes, ensuring they deliver value, as defined by Service Level Agreements (SLA). The process owner's value to the organisation can be quantified by the value he generates from his processes. Remuneration schemes can be linked to process service levels to crystalise their motivation.

Staff who work on process activities (process participants) report to the process owner and are responsible for meeting the service levels agreed with the process owner. Any individual staff member may contribute to a number of processes, and have numerous operational managers. It is important to distinguish this operational reporting from their line manager, who is responsible for negotiating achievable service levels, staff welfare, development.

T-Impact's Agile Lean Sigma approach defined the process-oriented organisation. Process owners (both regional and global) and process participants are defined and the workload is balanced to eliminate bottlenecks. Our BPM tools can determine staffing levels required to meet the average and peak throughput. Our solutions include a Business Activity Monitor (BAM), which measures individual and group performance against process service levels.

Role descriptions and performance targets can be generated for each process participant. The process provides transparency on how their work, combined with those of their colleagues, generate customer value. Role descriptions with process based responsibilities, ensure staff understand what is expected of them.

This process-oriented organisation provides a framework for measuring and rewarding performance which contributes directly to customer and corporate value.