In February the company moved from four operating regions to three. It was announced with a slide showing the new structure, took effect on the first of the month, and was, as far as the executive team was concerned, done.
For the systems it had barely started. Purchase approvals route by region and cost centre, so for five weeks orders raised in the dissolved region went to a manager who no longer held that budget and sat unapproved. The delivery performance report grouped depots by the old regions until April, which meant two board packs measured the new structure's targets against the old structure's numbers. Around a hundred and seventy people changed manager, and their access kept reflecting the old team because our access groups follow department codes, which were updated in batches over six weeks. Two depot managers could approve overtime for people they no longer managed, and one could not approve it for the people he now did. The expenses system kept its own hierarchy, maintained by hand, and nobody had touched it.
My department was not surprised by the change. We had been told in November, and it made very little difference, because there was nowhere to make the change once. When we counted afterwards, the shape of the organisation was held in thirty eight separate places across fourteen systems: approval chains, reporting hierarchies, access groups, distribution lists, cost centre mappings and the telephone hunt groups. Seven were maintained by my team and the rest by finance, payroll and a handful of operations analysts.
A reorganisation is designed as a change to people, by the people responsible for people. To our systems it is a change to data that has no master, and the chart on the slide is the only complete version of it that exists anywhere.
We now hold a register of where the structure lives. Human resources publish the hierarchy as a file on a fixed schedule, with effective dates, and seventeen of the thirty eight places now read from it directly. The remainder have a named owner and a checklist that runs against the effective date. New approval rules point to roles rather than people, so the authority moves when the role changes hands.
Everybody who saw the slide understood the new organisation immediately. Our systems needed it written down somewhere, once, and nobody had ever been asked to do that.
– Serguey Shinder
