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Home / Services / Strategy + Innovation Consulting / Spans and Layers Consulting

Spans and Layers Consulting

Clarkston’s organizational design solutions and spans & layers assessment allows organizations to quickly identify areas of opportunity to create a leaner, faster organization.

Project health check consulting entails a comprehensive analysis of a project and recommendations on how to get it back on track. This is all conducted by an independent, external consultant to give an objective perspective that is removed from the day-to-day activities of the project team. A project health check helps organizations prevent minor issues from becoming major problems or helps a project that’s stalled or derailing to get back towards accomplishing the original vision. At Clarkston Consulting, we’re known for our ability to partner with clients to deliver projects on time and on budget as well as for our ability to turn around ailing projects and get them on the road to recovery. A key component of our methodology is SuccessCheck.™ Our project health check implementations help clients focus on the right areas for improvement. By reinforcing positive outcomes and understanding how things are supposed to work, our team goes beyond focusing on areas for improvements. Our goal is to capture lessons learned and offer recommendations that enhance the project’s success and future initiatives. An effective and thorough project health check includes using an independent (third-party) facilitator, a cohesive strategy, a mixed-methods approach to research, stakeholder outreach, and a final report and action plan. The Clarkston Consulting team empowers organizations to improve their overall project health by pointing out the core differences between the reported status and reality to give a clear, honest picture of the actual situation and the path forward to achieving the project’s desired business benefits. During the check, our team will provide a comprehensive review, identify gaps and risks, and provide recommendations. Through the positives and the negatives, our aim is proactive problem prevention that saves money and time and gives you the opportunity to treat the root causes before they become major issues. We’ve been doing project health check implementations for more than 30 years, and we have a proven track record of executing quickly and seamlessly.

spans and layers

As companies evolve, their organizational structures naturally shift to meet new strategic and operational demands. In this process, functions transform, new departments emerge, and people are hired until, eventually, executives are confronted with a complex organizational structure. Teams are left with deep management layers that hinder the speed and agility needed to succeed in today’s intensely competitive environment.

Flatter organizational structures lead to more empowered employees and is an indicator of more efficient and effective organizations.​ A spans and layers assessment is the first step in that journey for most organizations. Spans and layers can help move an organization from its current organizational constructs to another, influencing how an organization delegates tasks to specific functions, teams, or individuals.

Spans and Layers Assessment

Looking for quick, effective way to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your company’s organizational structure? A spans and layers assessment evaluates management structures — spans being the number of people managers supervise and layers being the number of management layers between the top and bottom of an organization. See a three-step overview of our assessment process below.

1

Discovery + Review

  • Alignment on objectives, deliverables, and project communication
  • Benchmarks of organization against peers, specifically regarding capital allocation
  • Spans and layers evaluation with recommendations
2

Benchmarking + Future Org Design

  • Identification of potential organizational structures to achieve growth ambition
  • Recommendations on gaps and opportunities vs. leading industry practices
  • Identification of potential organizational synergies across options
3

Recommendations + Board Review

  • Board-ready recommendation and rationale on future state organizational structure
  • Roadmap to get from current organizational design to desired future organization
  • Executive summary deliverables prepared for Board of Directors

Benefits of a Spans and Layers Assessment

Customer Experience Strategy

Faster Decision Making

  • Decisions implemented more rapidly given fewer vertical layers
  • Decisions made by those closer to the work
  • Reduce smaller, non-specialized work-groups
Data Strategy

Improved Accountability

  • Fewer layers = faster top-to-bottom (and vice versa) communication
  • “Telephone effect” dissipates  ideas are less distorted as they move up & down the org.
Teamwork

Improved Behaviors

  • As span of control grows, supervisors/managers are no longer able to micro-manage
  • Employees are empowered with broader responsibilities
A Focused Strategy

Improved Cost Structure

  • Fewer managers required as spans increase
  • Opportunity for significant savings (if/where applicable)

We help organizations create more efficient and effective organizational structures.

A spans and layers assessment is an effective mechanism to move to a new structure quickly and efficiently while maximizing ownership of the new structure. Our clients have greatly benefitted from realignment as decentralized functions drive an increased administrative workload for managers. Let’s re-empower your team! For more than 30 years, we’ve been helping clients transform their organizational structures, and we have a proven track record of executing quickly and seamlessly.

Our proprietary spans and layers tool allows organizations to quickly develop a baseline understanding of their spans and layers — focusing on areas of improvement across structure, strategy, people, and processes. Learn more about this tool and how we can immediately deploy it to fit a variety of needs by contacting our team today.

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Phone: (919) 484-4400
Email: info@clarkstonconsulting.com

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