Core organization design frameworks.
We know the joke: consultants use way too many frameworks. But these are our favorites. Rooted in Jay Galbraith’s methodology and refined over years of practice, these are the essential models we rely on to guide our clients.
Build the end-to-end people strategy for the country or region; provide client insight and data-based decision support to assigned leaders.
Line-of-business leaders, country managers, regional executives
Personal interaction, team support
Define business requirements and demand with business partners; integrate across partners and functions to deliver talent solutions.
Line-of-business leaders, senior function executives
Leadership team interventions
Own core business processes and policy areas; define strategies, frameworks, and processes for the domain.
Firm-wide leadership, all employees
Scaled products through business partners and portals
Develop and manage the life cycle of all HR products; integrate product strategy, user experience, data, and technology.
HR function leads, firm-wide leadership, employees
Multiple channels
Own automated and shared operations delivery for assigned domains; drive automated solutions to leaders and employees.
Employees at all levels
Automated portals and AI agents
Example: HR service-delivery model for a large multinational financial services firm.
The service-delivery model is where function design starts: with a view of the function’s internal customers. Its purpose is to make hard choices about the best way to align scarce resources against internal client segments. An effective model identifies each client segment, the value delivered to it, and by what means, including technology and data, people augmented by AI, and complete automation. Agents are now active components of the functional operating model.
We treat the model as the opening conversation in a function design, not a complex artifact. We co-create it with the function’s leadership team, informed by interviews with the operating leaders who are its customers. The goal is to make sure each part of the function makes a unique contribution and has a clear customer for its work, and that resources are applied with a clear sense of priorities. We then test it against the work sort in the function-value framework and adjust both before any structure is drawn.