Organizational redesign
A software company that served other businesses had been on an acquisition spree. Unlike many businesses in its market, it had done very well in the recent economic downturn and it saw an opportunity to gain global market share. It had acquired a variety of software components and software organizations and it now faced a significant challenge: how do you integrate these components to get the most value from these assets?
The company hired a new CIO to transform the organization and the technology. He hired us to conduct a comprehensive strategic assessment. Using one of our proprietary frameworks, we analyzed the current strategy, organization, technology and delivery model. We developed some interesting conclusions.
First, strategic leadership had been lacking in many of the acquired organizations for years. There was a reason the acquisitions had not done well in the market and had set themselves up to be sold: they lacked a central strategy even though they had a good set of technology and many of them had brilliant architects and developers on staff.
Second, the way they built technology was different across the organizations. It was almost impossible to move people between projects because the ramp up on new technologies and new processes and methods was time consuming. This meant that there was little to no sharing between the organizations and no value was being created from integrating the companies that had been purchased.
Third, integration into the sales organization was poor. The sales group was trying to figure out how to package these diverse tools into a set of offerings that their clients would purchase, but they were getting little support from the technology organization. This was leading to missed opportunities and lost revenue.
We kicked off an organizational redesign project to realign the organization to the strategic goal of getting more value out of these disparate systems. Simultaneously, we kicked off a process and methodology improvement project to combine the best parts of the various methods across the organization.
The reorganization resulted in immediate financial savings as redundant roles and functions were consolidated across the groups. Enabled by improved processes and methods, these groups raised their productivity and quality. Additionally, integration with the sales group improved, which drove cross platform sales that led to an improvement in top line revenue growth.
Note*: The details of the industry and size have been changed, but the kinds of deliverables created and the results are real.