ODF’s Community Engagement & Learning Team is pleased to launch a new series we’re calling “Design Dilemmas.” Each Design Dilemma session will feature a community member sharing an organization design challenge they have and getting perspectives from others in the call.  The conversations will be facilitated by a organization design expert.  

Sessions are designed to be interactive and focused on learning, whether you are new to the work or wrote the book on it!

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Context:  For over fifteen years we have invested in providing dedicated internal organization design capabilities to our business unit leaders.  In all this time the organization design professionals (3 FTEs) have always been under the Corporate HR umbrella.  Organization design grew out of a practice started within the Workforce Development organization and later moved to the Total Rewards organization when HR was reorganized, and the Workforce Development group was restructured. 

The Organization Design team enjoys an excellent reputation among business unit leaders for having robust tools, deep subject-matter expertise, and a history of delivering highly effective outcomes.  As a result, the team has always had a backlog of requests from business unit leaders looking for ways to improve effectiveness or seeking efficiencies in a thoughtful and considered way.  This is a global business and, as such, the organization design team members travel world-wide to support requests received based on those with the greatest overall business impact.  Although we have a corporate center that includes Finance, HR, Health & Safety, Technology Center, etc., the business units are highly autonomous.  Therefore, they are not bound by governance requiring them to use internal organization design resources.  The cost of engaging internal organization design resources is built into the corporate overhead costs charged to each business unit.  The organization design professionals do not “time-write” (i.e. charge business units a per-hour fee) for services.

Desired Outcome: While HR management has been willing to provide a home for org design capabilities, the capabilities are not core to HR’s value proposition (while benefits, payroll, talent & learning, diversity & inclusion, etc., are core).  HR management seeks to understand how best to position our organization design capabilities.

Three focus questions to entertain:

1. 1) Where should organization design capabilities reside within a corporate structure to reap the greatest benefit from this specialized knowledge and skillset?
2. 2) How could the operating model be structured to effectively utilize these resources to deliver value?  Considering the end-to-end flow from how org design projects enter the organization, are prioritized, and supported.
3. 3) What should governance that determines project intake and prioritization look like? Is it a single functional manager or a steering committee (if so, which roles and what decision criteria are needed)?

Our session will be facilitated by Mark LaScola with ON THE MARK

Mark’s passion for collaborative organization design and operating model modernization sits at the heart of OTM. Since his first redesign experience in 1987, Mark has focused his career on learning, delivering, and innovating this honorable work over OTM’s 33 years. Mark authored OTM’s organization design solution – the most comprehensive, holistic, and integrated organization design solution in the industry based on OTM’s successful delivery of close to 500 redesigns and operating model modernizations around the globe.  He has trained over 5,000 internal change agents, managers, and executives in OTM’s unique organization design solution. Mark believes deeply in giving back to our industry. He and OTM team members and alumni are active members of the ODF, the ODC, EODF and STS.  Mark is a current board member on the Organization Design Community (ODC), a past founding board member of the European Organisation Design Forum and is proudly a Certified Organization Design Practitioner (CODP).  When not traveling for fun and work, Mark resides in Phoenix, AZ.