Organization Design Workshop

Facilitation Guide
Gartner Document Subtitle

What it does:
This tool helps HR/OE professionals facilitate a design workshop geared toward mapping
out a new organization design for an existing area/team.

Instructions:
HR/OE professionals should follow the steps below for guidance and tips on how best to facilitate
participants in a design workshop to map out a new organization design. The workshop contains
three stages:
1. Mapping the work to be done
2. Creating new design options
3. Selecting the best design option 

Notes:
 All the images you might want to present to your design project team are included in
PowerPoint format in our Design Workshop Presentation Materials deck.
 The steps in this facilitation guide are created with redesigning an existing area in mind;
however, it can be adapted easily for designing a new area. In those instances, you should
follow the same steps but remove the Identifying Pain Points portion of Stage 1.

Prerequisites:
Before starting, ensure that the following are in place. These inputs should be complete before you
attempt to map out a new design:
 Leaders’ Vision for the Redesign
 Leaders’ Objectives for the Redesign
 Leaders’ Redesign Priorities

[See Steps 2.1 and 2.2. of our Ignition Guide to Conducting an Organization Redesign for support
on how to develop these.]

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide
Prework for the Facilitator:
1. Assemble the design workshop team.
a. Who: Gartner recommends creating a design workshop team comprising employees
engaged in doing the work. This approach minimizes the likelihood of the redesign
overlooking fundamental aspects of the work being done. Gartner research also
shows that involving frontline employees has the greatest impact on the likelihood of
a redesign meeting its objectives.
b. Who: Recruit one member of the leadership team to act as a sponsor for the design
workshop. Their role will be to provide the workshop with context on the redesign’s
vision and objectives, and to present the group’s work back to leadership
c. How many: This will depend on the scale of the redesign. For smaller parts of your
business, strive to have enough people for 3 subteams (i.e., 9-15 people). For larger
areas, strive to have enough people for 5 subteams (i.e., 15-30 people).

2. To save time during the workshop, you should identify the key high-level workflows that
underpin the area you are redesigning. [Note – See Step 1.2 of our Ignition Guide to
Conducting an Organization Redesign for support materials for doing so.]
a. These workflows should match well with the most important outcomes (“key bodies
of work”) the business area produces for customers (internal or external).
b. The best way to identify these will be to canvas a select group of senior managers at
the level below leadership and then confirm them with the area leader.

3. Prepare the different materials you will be using during a session in advance. This will
ensure you don’t waste precious time during the sessions.

Checklist of what you’ll need:

1. A clear outline of the area being redesigned
2. An outline of any elements of the design or inputs to the design that are
fixed and won’t be addressed (e.g., product design, design features that
have been mandated from the corporate center)
3. Three elements set in advance by leadership:
a. The redesign’s vision
b. The redesign’s objectives
c. Redesign priorities
4. The area’s key workflows
5. The size and makeup of the workforce in the area being redesigned
6. Facilitation materials (provided below):
a. Workflow mapping example
b. Typical workflow pain points
c. Example drawing of new design
d. New design questions and feasibility checks

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide
Kicking Off the Design Workshop:
Setting the right tone is critical when facilitating a design workshop. You should do two things:
1. Emphasize the importance of this being an active session. Regardless of whether this is a
physical or virtual setting, the team should be active, working on a whiteboard and with
Post-it notes.
2. Share some critical elements of the work/context already in place:
a. Clearly mark out the area being redesigned [Note – See Step 1.2 of our Ignition
Guide to Conducting an Organization Redesign for support materials for doing so.]
b. Highlight any key elements of the design or key inputs to the design that are fixed
and won’t be addressed (e.g., product design, design features that have been
mandated from the corporate center).
c. Three key elements set in advance by leadership:
i. The redesign’s vision
ii. The redesign’s goals/objectives
iii. Redesign priorities
These will help the design workshop participants focus their work on the areas that matter.
Likewise, they will give the team a yardstick against which to measure their work.

Stage 1: Map the Work to Be Done

Purpose: Help the design workshop participants:
i. Create a clear view of the work that the new design will group people around.
ii. Uncover pain points the new design should resolve.
Advice: An overly prescriptive approach here will result in lost learning opportunities and
overlooked pain points. Give the design workshop participants pointers on how to map workflows
and key pain points to record, and be their timekeeper, but otherwise let them self-direct.
Method:
Kickoff:
Give a quick overview of the key workflows that exist in the area being redesigned [see the
prework guidance above on how to identify those]. Take time to explain how you arrived at these
key workflows and who you partnered with to do so. These workflows should make sense to the
participants, but if there are certain known workflows that have been excluded or folded into a
larger workflow, make sure to highlight and give rationale for those instances.
Dots and Line Activity:
For each key workflow, ask participants to diagram how work passes between different roles in the
form of tasks and handoffs. The participants should map out how processes actually take place as
opposed to how they are envisioned or originally designed, if those things differ. They should:
1. Represent each role in a process as a dot or small circle, labeled with the role name (either
the role in the process or the job title, not a person’s name).

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide
2. List the key tasks performed by each role and the key skills required to perform those tasks
well. (This will provide visibility into load-bearing skills and areas of potential skills
synergies.)
3. Then, between those points, draw lines to represent handoffs or process ownership
changes.
4. Seek out workflow pain points, and circle them in red. Then, describe the nature of the
friction identified. (Mapping workflows in this manner will make it easier to align on pain
points.)
Here is an example of what the team should be working on their whiteboard:

Guidance You Should Give as a Facilitator:

1. Encourage participants to get up and work on a whiteboard, using Post-it notes to track
pain points and skills required.
2. Give the group brief guidance on how to map each key workflow. Once they get started,
this activity will be intuitive, but you will have an important role in ensuring they stay at the
right level and don’t get caught in the weeds.

Goal: To map out a high-level workflow based on (1) how it provides value to your
customers, and (2) how that work is operationalized into daily work

Guidance:
 Focus on what, not who: Map core work activities to the identified workflow,
focusing on the activities and roles themselves, rather than the individual people
who perform them, to maintain objectivity.
 Ground it in the work: Consider activities and tasks you completed in the past

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide
year as well as those you anticipate performing in the future.
 Draw it: Drawing out the workflow will help you to assess whether any key
pieces are missing.

3. Give the group brief guidance on the types of pain points they should be recording.
Again, these types of pain points will be intuitive to the group, so the guidance should
simply be a quick listing of what to look out for:

Wrap Up:
Having mapped each of the key workflows, the design workshop participants should align on the
most important pain points to try to alleviate in a new design.

The full group can record their findings using the template below. If the time allotment for the
workshop will not allow for this activity to take place in full, you can ask participants to fill out this
form directly and skip the dots and lines exercise. Shortcutting this exercise will likely yield less
complete results, unidentified frictions, and a less robust and engaging discussion. It should only
be considered when it is impossible to allow sufficient time and attention to complete the more
robust exercise.

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide

Stage 2: Create New Design Options

Purpose: Explore different design options to best deliver on the key workflows to be done and the
redesign’s vision and objectives.
Advice: Organization design is messy and nonlinear; make sure the design workshop participants
are active and drawing.
Method:
Activity Setup:
 At this point, you should split the workshop into groups of 3-5 people. Task each group with
developing the organization design that best organizes people to deliver the workflows they
have just mapped.
[If the workshop has too few participants to split into groups, challenge them to come up
with more than one potential structure so multiple options can be considered.]

 Remind people to be active and draw; designing is a messy, nonlinear process, so

empower them to be active in working through ideas and to draw them out. Share this
example as a reference point:

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide

 Refresh the following with the design workshop participants to help them complete their
task:
o Three elements set in advance by leadership:
 The redesign’s vision
 The redesign’s objectives
 The redesign priorities — These will be critical for helping the groups decide
between the inevitable tensions that arise.
o Fixed elements of the design/fixed inputs to the design
o The size and makeup of the current team [This is something you will have already
developed earlier in the redesign process.]
o A summary of pain points identified during the first stage of the workshop

 Take a moment to educate the team on the difference between task-based and outcome-
based organization structures, and share typical examples:

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 Organization Design Workshop
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Prompts to Give the Groups to Help Them Make Progress in their Work:
 To help the teams get started and make progress, instruct them to reflect on these
questions:

Key Questions

Building teams  Permanence: Which workflows/parts of workflows need permanent

around the work teams, and which ones should have temporary teams that assemble and
to be done: disassemble?
 Groupings: Which key workflows/parts of workflows are so
interdependent that the people doing them should be in the same team?
 Reporting: Will teams be grouped formally (i.e., sharing the same
reporting relationship) or in a networked/matrixed fashion (i.e., coming
together to deliver on workflows)?
 Makeup: Will the teams comprised members with the same roles/skills,
or will they fuse together different roles/skill sets?
 Interfaces: How will teams “contract” or work with others?

Combining  Level by Level: Working down (from the top level, which has been set
those teams into by leadership), is it better to group teams by task or by outcome?
a formal  Network or Structure: What role will formal reporting lines play, and
structure: what role will networks play?

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 Organization Design Workshop
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 To help the teams pressure-test their progress, instruct them to apply these pressure tests
and problem-solve as they work:

Feasibility Checks & Potential Solutions

Feasibility Checks Potential Solutions

Skills Scarcity:  Can we scale in-demand skills by creating a

Are any of the teams overly reliant
on specific skills? Can we afford the
skills needed, and/or can we hire for
them?
centralized CoE with which teams contract?
 Are there certain workflows that can be
combined in one team?
 Does the plan have budget to hire for
additional skills?

Cognitive Load:  Can we refocus teams away from volume by

Are any teams at risk of being grouping by outcome rather than task?
overwhelmed by the amount or  Can we reduce variety by specializing roles
variety of work? and/or teams?
 Can we reduce manager spans of control?
 Does the plan have budget to hire for
additional skills?

Success Outside Our Control:  Can outside teams be brought into the area
Are any teams overly reliant on the being redesigned?
work of people outside the area  Can we redesign how we interact with key
being redesigned? outside teams?

Affordability:  Can we scale in-demand skills by creating a

Is the design affordable? centralized CoE with which teams contract?
 Can we increase manager spans of control?
 Can we further standardize any processes
so more employees can carry them out, or
so they can be completed more quickly?

Stage 3: Select the Best Design Option

Purpose: Select the design that best meets the goals of the redesign and the needs of the key
work to be done.

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide
Advice: No organization design will perfectly satisfy its goals and constraints. Make sure the
design workshop participants aren’t seeking perfection so they can begin to plan in nondesign
solutions for the preferred design’s weak points.
Method:
Step 1: Grouping Designs
The design subteams should come together to share their different design ideas and group similar
designs. It is inevitable that different teams will have similar designs, so this activity will reduce the
number of designs being compared.

Step 2: Evaluate the Designs

Next, the teams should evaluate the reduced number of design options against the redesign’s
vision, its objectives and the degree to which it encompasses all the key work to be done:

Criteria Design Option A Design Option B

Satisfies redesign [✓/-/X] [✓/-/X]

vision and
objectives  Add 1-3 bullets of commentary  Add 1-3 bullets of commentary

Follows redesign [✓/-/X] [✓/-/X]

priorities
 Add 1-3 bullets of commentary  Add 1-3 bullets of commentary
Minimizes process [✓/-/X] [✓/-/X]
pain points
 Add 1-3 bullets of commentary  Add 1-3 bullets of commentary
Passes feasibility [✓/-/X] [✓/-/X]
checks
 Add 1-3 bullets of commentary  Add 1-3 bullets of commentary

Preferred Design:

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 Organization Design Workshop
Facilitation Guide
[Optional] Step 3: Plan Forward for Nondesign Solutions
Finally, the design workshop participants can plan ahead and brainstorm nondesign solutions to
any weakness areas in the preferred design.

Examples

Design Weak Points Potential Nondesign Solutions

Centralized CoE will not be able to Create a clear prioritization guide for how work is
meet all the demand for its services. selected.

Affordable spans of control risk  Provide specific training for managers on how to
managers becoming overwhelmed. prioritize their time.
 Create a connections marketplace so employees can
learn skills from experts who aren’t their managers.

Concluding the Design Workshop:

Thank everyone for their time, and outline next steps.

Likely next steps:

 Leadership team sponsor to present winning design option back to leadership
 Brief follow-up workshops sessions to address any feedback highlighted by leadership
 Update to design workshop team outlining implementation steps so they can act as change
champions

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