Industry Transformation Alignment

Starting point
A senior vice president with global production responsibility had addressed work culture, management team capability, and structure at one of the production sites. The measures had successfully reduced the level of conflict between the different units. Still, he felt unsure about the extent to which the organization would be able to successfully transform with the industry.

The manager asked a group of Vice Presidents from different parts of the site to evaluate this issue at a workshop.

Analysis
Given the above, the ambition of the workshop was to assess:

1. In general, is the organization capable of successfully transform along with the industry?
2. Are there specific areas that can be improved and, if so, how could such improvements be undertaken?

As for assessment 2, the group assessed the current state of most organizational parameters to ‘low’ or ‘medium’. Among these:

1. Purpose and associated ambition of most vice president positions were to a greater or lesser extent a. unclear or nonexistent, b. not coherent, and c. not aligned with neither strategy nor transformation ambition.
2. Accountability and decision-making mandates were (very) unclear.
3. To further hamper the above mentioned issues, who was entitled to do what when and why in numerous project organizations and in the basic organization was unclear to everybody.

In summary, the site organization was not prepared to transform with the industry

What was done and outcome
Presented with the work and conclusions of the workshop, it was clear to the senior vice president that the organizational setup was not viable and that the task was not merely to adjust and optimize the existing one but to design a new one.