Introduction and challenges
Organisations recognise that people and capabilities are critical to their success, yet many fail to develop clear strategies for retaining, developing, motivating and evolving their workforce to meet their business needs.
Most organisations going through a transformation have people capabilities at the heart of their challenge. Often knowledgeable and experienced team members are needed for key project roles, leaving gaps in business-as-usual activities. Organisations can buy skills in to help during a change process but there is still a need to manage the knowledge transfer to ensure that a sustainable change is delivered; getting this balance right can be the difference between a change that sticks and a change that fails.
A frequent cause of poor performance is misaligned personal metrics and incentives. Organisations need to look holistically at how they measure and incentivise people, treating their people in the way the corporate strategy expects and motivating them to do the things the operating model requires.
A strong organisation design and people capability roadmap is essential for organisations to achieve their strategic goals.
How we can help
We review, design and implement organisational changes, setting up or refining teams and even whole business structures, and helping clients build the capabilities of their people. As part of this, we have a framework to assess existing people capabilities and a programme that helps leaders map out improvement plans to address identified gaps.
We provide the following support:
- Provision of a clear framework to assess, design and embed a new organisation structure
- Identification of the core competencies an organisation should be investing in, aligned to the business and operations strategy. This includes insight into best practices in evolving areas such as digital capabilities
- Creation of a target organisation design
- Development of clear roles and responsibilities. This includes definitions, capabilities required, key interfaces and metrics
- People assessments. We use our scprime® people capabilities framework to complete a rapid assessment of existing team members, providing a clear report on current capabilities and gaps, and work with teams to develop actions to close gaps
- Assessment of number of people by role, typically driven by scope and complexity of roles
- Education and engagement with stakeholders at all levels to ensure buy-in and alignment
- Training and education strategy and execution to support transformation programmes
Developing the right people capabilities in an organisation is often a gradual and continuous process. This must be managed carefully and take into account the business’s change history; there is no standard answer as every organisation wants to achieve different things and starts from a different place.