Client Stories

ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTURE AND REDESIGN

Exponential Not Incremental
As the Executive Team of a national association considered the strategic challenges facing their profession, they realized that there really is strength in numbers. The association's programmatic, advocacy and other goals would all be significantly advanced by engaging more people in their work.

While the association represented most of the institutions in their field, only a fraction of the 50,000 individuals working in the field were members. Future growth would have to focus on individuals, but traditional "retail" membership recruitment strategies would be expensive, time consuming and would produce incremental growth at best.

The association launched a "wholesale" membership strategy in which every individual associated with a member institution is eligible for full membership privileges at no cost. This entrepreneurial strategy became financially viable through practical business planning: re-thinking how the association provides its programs and services, leveraging technology to make communication with members efficient and cost effective, and developing earned-income revenue streams that will offset the loss of individual member dues. While it is unlikely that all 50,000 potential members will actually join the association, the Executive Team would be satisfied with the more modest 1,000% increase anticipated over the next year alone.

Moving Around: Restructuring an Organization
As an outcome of its strategic planning process, a government agency decided to integrate two of its divisions whose work was clearly aligned. While the decision made sense at a strategic level and received the support of staff in both divisions, it has resulted in a great deal of overlap and duplication of effort, as well as a lack of clarity with respect to the specific roles and functions among staff in the newly integrated unit. CHP&M was brought in to examine the division's structure and staff alignment to ensure that it was organized in a manner that best utilized the talents and skills of the staff and maximized the efficiency and effectiveness of division as a whole. CHP&M worked with the staff to design a new organizational structure that is better aligned with the goals, strategies and values identified in the strategic plan and that supports the division's desire for a more integrated approach to carrying out its mission.

The Networked Organization: A Work in Progress
One result of the strategic planning process of a national membership organization was the realization that the traditional association structure could not support the future vision of the group. Competition for funding between the national association and its chapters and a resistance to a dues increase from the membership created barriers to the implementation of many of the plan's goals. CHP&M worked with the board and staff of the association to invent a new organizational structure based on our understanding of how computer networks operate: individual nodes of information and resources connected by a hub that draws upon and coordinates the activities of the entire system. This new structure is dramatically changing the roles and responsibilities of both the members of the network and the organization itself. Members are now seen as owners, stakeholders, and value-added resources of the organization, not simply as consumers of the work of the national office.