How to design your company structure in X steps

Back from my holiday (managed not to get sunburnt.) Just using this blog as a brain dump for some organisational development process stuff....

1. Map out your end-to-end core customer process at a high level.

This should be no more than four steps. Something like:

1. Client makes contact
2. Define a project/contract
3. Deliver project
4. Develop client relationship

2. Break each area down into a list of tasks, each written on post-it notes.

For example, you might start breaking 'Develop client relationships' into:

• Hold regular client update meetings
• Gather client satisfaction feedback
• Share client feedback with the rest of the company
• Cross-sell additional products and services
• Write monthly newsletter
• Send relevant press cuttings/web links to clients
• etc

To make sure you've got everything down you can go through each current role you have at your company and check that everyone's tasks have been listed somewhere. And then go through wish-lists of tasks that are being neglected at the moment or that you think you'll need as your business grows.

3. As a group exercise, move the post-it notes around to cluster tasks into  roles.

You can perform this exercise a few times, with different groups of people from your company to generate some different options.

To be continued (probably)....