Optimizing Organization Design

Book excerpt: Optimizing Organization Design offers a comprehensive resource and valued guide for anyone interested in improving organization performance. The book presents an approach to optimizing organization design that is based on over 100 large scale projects and 23 research studies that have been completed by Capelle Associates over the past 25 years. In addition, the book includes insightful comments from executives on their success in using this approach. Capelle’s research and client experience reveal that optimizing organization design leads to better financial performance, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. It can provide a competitive advantage and a significant return on investment. It can also become the foundation of both strategy implementation and human resources management. Capelle shows that organization design includes the alignment of a number of critical factors, including positions (vertical and functional); accountabilities and authorities (managerial and cross functional); people; deliverables and tasks. He shows that manager – direct report alignment is the single most important organization design variable. His research also shows that it is suboptimal nearly half the time. This is a horrendous waste of talent and capability, but also provides a significant opportunity for improvement in organization performance. Optimizing Organization Design clearly explains how to implement organization design improvements. This approach includes people change management, project management, and a cascading, iterative approach that is based on teams and involves education, doing real work and feedback. In addition, Optimizing Organization Design includes special sections on the role of the Board of Directors, project management, process management and compensation. In addition, the author has included four case studies and a useful glossary.