The Challenge:
A well-known company with a web/cloud-based sales application had ambitious new financial goals for fiscal year 2012. This was the driver to re-organize their sales workforce of 2500 people in a way that would position them to meet the new market demands for 2012.
Planning the new organization was not an easy assignment. There were thirty separate organizations spread around the world, the company had to factor in cultural differences and that five different languages were spoken. Each group would participate in the planning process, each designing their piece of the total organization. None of the organizations had a process for planning such large organizations; neither did any have tools to assist in the planning process. Organizational plans were all in different formats and could not be assembled into any kind of unified plan. Adding to the complexity were the technical demands of having to integrate the final organizational plan data into the WorkDay application. This was new and very complex territory for the entire company.
In summary, by the time the exercise would be completed they would need to:
- Combine all individual workgroup plans into one uniform and cohesive plan,
- Validate that they designed the best organization,
- Ensure everyone was working from one common set of job titles
- Communicate the new plan to all stakeholders, and finally
- Automatically update WorkDay with the all new organization information.
The Solution:
For this solution OfficeWork Software’s Professional Services Group was engaged to:
- Assess the requirements,
- Design a set of processes,
- Customize their OrgChart Pro visualization application to create the new organization structure.
Figure 1 – The Planning Process
The WorkDay application manages employee payroll and personnel data. WorkDay contains such information such as Employee Name, Job Title, Employee ID, Supervisor ID, Salary, and Classification.
The OrgChartPro application turns the personnel information into data-driven hierarchy/organizational diagrams that can be conditionally formatted, manipulated for “what-if scenarios”, and published to graphical or data outputs (i.e., Excel, SQL, Oracle, etc.) to give the planners a visual representation of what the organization will look like. Additionally, the OrgChartPro application performs hierarchical calculations for budget, headcount, span of control, and workforce vitality. This program was chosen because of its ease of use, flexibility and ability to work with other tools used by the company in supporting the workforce planning process.
“There were many features we liked about the OrgChartPro application, but the one that stood out in particular was the ability to easily reassign people to new managers or promote based upon simple dropdown menus. That really made our planning process easy for everyone to follow.” Director, Strategic Sales Organization
Solution Steps:
Automatic Chart Creation and Distribution
OrgChartPro was updated from WorkDay through an Excel report consisting of 55 data fields to create the workforce visualization pictured below. The organization charts were automatically created for over 2,500 employees in minutes. Each box in the chart displayed just enough data for the analysts to make the right assignments (Figure 2).
Ensuring Data Uniformity and Integrity
The company took advantage of OrgChartPro’s special dropdown fields to ensure that a common set of titles would be used by all 30 organizations. This was essential for two reasons: First it established a common set of titles and second It ensured getting data compatibility with WorkDay. To introduce any title variation would prevent WorkDay being successfully updated.
Figure 3 –OrgChart Pro Dropdown Fields Automatically Eliminate Plan Data Errors
Using the OrgChartPro’s special Enumerator field feature all users received a common predefined dropdown list of job titles, managers, and job classifications. This was instrumental in ensuring the necessary data integrity so that WorkDay could be successfully updated automatically. These dropdown fields were created automatically in the chart creation process.
Automated Distributing of Charts and Data
After the charts were automatically created the next challenge was to get them in the hands of each planning group. Fortunately OrgChart Pro’s sub-charting and distribution feature enabled the client to send each of the thirty organizations their respective charts.
Making Necessary Personnel Changes
Upon receipt each workforce analyst then filtered the top candidates for transfer, promotion or title changes. Through the use of user-configurable rules, employees with the desired profiles were easily filtered. Then using the dropdown lists (see Figure 4) the desired selections were made. Custom rule-based filters and standardized dropdown data selection was a significant factor in ensuring that all plans would be of consistent quality.
Assigning employees to a new supervisor was performed through a dropdown selection of available to supervisors. This method guaranteed valid data at the conclusion of the planning process. The example below (Figure 4) shows an employee being assigned to a new supervisor through a dropdown list of all managers in the company.
This approach made it very easy for everyone participating to understand and perform and again insured data consistency. In previous exercises they found it impossible to make the org changes without introducing data and logic errors – which are very and time-consuming to correct.
Figure 4 – Employees Reassigned to New Positions through Dropdown Selection
Validation
After completion of the workforce changes, charts were sent back to the central group who used the OrgChartPro compare utility to ensure desired changes were made correctly. The compare utility makes before and after chart comparisons automatically, showing differences record-by-record, field-by-field.
WorkDay Updates
After approval, the chart data was exported from OrgChartPro and successfully updated in WorkDay. This was possible because the data field edits were controlled in OrgChartPro. The client noted that without the expert service and the OrgChartPro tool set this would have been an extremely difficult project to coordinate. OfficeWork Software’s consulting support and OrgChartPro made the data management fast, easy and accurate.
Conclusion
In less than two weeks all 30 organizations successfully completed changes to their respective workforces and submitted their charts for the final aggregation and data validation. By using the automated features of OrgChartPro and the uniform planning process used by the client, the plan for the new organization was successfully completed and final updates were made to WorkDay and rolled out across the company.
A review of the project by the client and OfficeWork Software concluded that intelligent pre-planning, a well-designed process, and expert tool support all contributed to a successful outcome.
As a result of this engagement the client has a gained a repeatable process for any organizational redesign effort. Designing the optimal organization to support new corporate objectives is now an effective capability within the company.
About OrgChartPro and OfficeWork Software
OfficeWork Software is the developer OrgChartPro product line and provides specialized consulting services that enable organizations to better visualize and manage their workforce in a more efficient manner. OrgChartPro is available for Windows and as Microsoft VISIO add-in.
Additional information is available by contacting sales@officeworksoftware.com, or visiting us at www.orgchartpro.com and www.orgchartforvisio.com or www.officeworksoftware.com
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