1. Evaluate and, if necessary, refine the business strategy. Strategy should drive structure. Strategy should provide fact-based, clear, compelling, boundary-setting answers to these questions:
    • What products/services will we offer and not offer?
    • Which products/services will we emphasize?
    • What markets will we and will we not serve?
    • Which markets will we emphasize?
    • What competitive advantage(s) will cause us to be successful?
    • How will we measure our strategic performance?
       
  2. Identify the business processes that are most critical to the successful implementation of the strategy. Strategy and business processes should be the two primary drivers of structure. Business processes—the activity flows through which work gets done—must be supported by the structure.
     
  3. Define the characteristics of an organization structure that supports the strategy and the core processes. To ensure that the structure evaluation is comprehensive and that there is a framework for the debate, it is best to begin by developing a set of decision criteria, or objectives. These objectives enable you to compare strengths and weaknesses as you decide among alternative structures. In some cases, they are more effectively used as the specifications for your design of the best structure.
     
  4. Define other objectives to be met by the organization structure. In addition to supporting your strategy and core processes, you want your organization structure to serve other purposes. Your additional objectives may relate to administrative cost and people needs. In some cases, these selection criteria carry nearly as much weight as those related to strategy or business processes.
     
  5. Generate alternative organization designs. In this step, the options are described at a level of detail that enables them to be assessed against the decision criteria and compared to other options.
     
  6. Select the best organization structure. Since there is no universally correct structure, the purpose of Step 6 is to determine the organization design that is best for the unique needs of a business at a point in time. This step surfaces both the strengths and the weaknesses of each alternative structure. Shortcomings in the strongest candidates may be minimized or eliminated by modifying the design to incorporate aspects of the other alternatives.
     
  7. Develop ...

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