No doubt about it, customer-centric process design creates work that’s not supported by existing organizational structures. Should organizational design take the lead and define a customer-friendly organizational structure process can work within – or should process design the work first, with organizational design following?
With your answer, you’re changing, perhaps radically changing, organizational outcomes in sales, marketing and customer service. If organizational design goes first, you’re highly likely to wind up organizing around traditional role definitions, although perhaps with some modification. If you let process go first – and process redesign happens from the customer in – you’re much more likely to need significant restructuring to fully enable new work.
To tack on another question, should there be a default choice, barring extenuating circumstances, or is the answer so context-sensitive that each situation bears individual scrutiny.
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