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Organisational
Strategy Formulation – A Territorial Tale
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Customers had consistently
complained about the difficulty of penetrating the organisation
to get things done. They said, and account managers (who were effectively
responsible for multi-million dollar technology service businesses)
confirmed, that the account managers just did not have the authority
to get problems solved.
The company had long
had a powerful delivery unit that was able to tell account teams
what they would and would not deliver, based on their internal economies
of scale, operational structures and internal priorities. They were
even in a position to determine which capital programs to promote
and which to condemn, using internal costing arguments.
Operations was structured
along functional and technical competence lines. When the complaints
became irritating Operations appointed ‘account managers’
who were to liaise with the client-facing account teams, but their
careers were based in Operations. Arguments that Operations were
not client-focused were now rejected; they had account managers
liaising with their ‘internal customers’.
Several attempts were
made at ‘reinventing ‘ the (customer) account manager’s
role and responsibilities. The result was that a few exceptional
account managers had a greater success rate, but at the expense
of other accounts. Good account managers failed and left.
Eventually a strategic
workshop became the place for a showdown between customer accounts
and operations. The accounts teams’ leader battled with the
operations leader and other leaders took sides.
The workshop laid out
various organisational options, the most popular one was to restructure
operations along lines of business instead of functions, the lines
of business would deliver according to the accounts’ ‘orders’.
The horse would be put before the cart, operations would respond
to the customers’ needs and the operational leaders would
be measured on customer delivery metrics, not on technical delivery
metrics.
It took the departure
of an operations leader to enable this strategy to be approved and
the change program to be resourced.
The Organisational Realignment
change program is another story!
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