The Organization System

This article introduces The Organization System, explaining how this provides a practical framework to address the fundamental organization design and workforce planning challenge:  to ensure the right people with the right skills are doing the right work in the right numbers at the right cost.  Without data-driven methods, this objective is at best an aspiration and risks being little more than a cliché. 

The Organization System

Roles, Positions and People data provide the foundation.

Roles and Positions are terms which are often used interchangeably. However, there are essential differences:

Roles are defined with target data.  Target data for roles falls in to three categories: 

• Financial:  the level/ grade of the role and its target/ benchmark cost.
• Activities:  the work to be conducted and the accountabilities held (e.g. RACI, RAD).
• Competencies:  the knowledge, experience and skills needed to perform and the required proficiency levels. 

Role target data equips you with the foundation for understanding whether the right people are doing the right work with the right skills at the right cost, because you have a definition of ‘right’. 

Positions are planned for defined Roles.  Specifying positions within a framework of defined roles maintains consistency and prevents proliferation which can otherwise emerge.  We are not advocating unrealistic uniformity.  The same role in a different location for example, may incur a different position cost based on local labor market dynamics.  Significantly, however, the role data provides an anchor point for specifying positions.  Without role data, there risks being too many position-level variations for efficient planning.  Variation from role targets may exist, but with the anchor point of the role data, there is transparency on exceptions which prevent these from becoming the norm. 

Roles can be either fixed or variable.  Fixed roles only ever have one position (e.g., Chief Revenue Officer), whilst variable roles have multiple positions (e.g., Sales Executive), with the number of positions being rightsized based on planned business outcomes and assumptions (e.g., target revenue and the revenue per sales executive).  The planned number of positions – ‘demand’ in workforce planning terms – determines “the right numbers”. 

People in Positions perform Roles.  Actuals data for people follows the same three-point format as the Role-defined targets: 

• Financial:  the actual cost of people in the workforce.
• Activities:  the actual work conducted, and the accountabilities exercised.
• Competencies:  the knowledge, experience and skills possessed, and the proficiency levels demonstrated. 

Actuals data for Activities and Competencies can be collected through Orgvue Surveys or ingested from existing sources. 
 

This is not a theory.  This is the Orgvue data model.

Each component of the organization system is a connected dataset in Orgvue.  Identifying gaps between Role targets and people actuals reveals the extent to which “the right people are doing the right work with the right skills”.   Rightsizing and cost projections reveal whether these are delivered in "the right numbers and the right cost”.

The Orgvue Data Model