The situation
A merger, a shared service or a restructure produces one legal entity carrying several inherited ways of working, several sets of decision rights and several service designs. Structure charts are the easy part. What takes eighteen months is deciding who decides, what each service is for, and which of the inherited models survives.
It is the same problem whether four councils are becoming one, a housing association is consolidating services it has grown into, or a body is reorganising around a changed remit. The design is rarely the thing that fails. What fails is the assumption that people will work the new way because a diagram says so.
What we deliver
| Deliverable | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Current state and gap analysis | What each legacy organisation does in practice, and where they differ |
| Target operating model design | Service model, structure, governance, and the interfaces between them |
| Decision rights and delegation | Who can commit what without escalating, and what the scheme of delegation or constitution has to say for that to hold |
| Corporate services model | Whether finance, HR, ICT and procurement consolidate, sit inside services or move to a shared centre, and what each option costs to run |
| Customer access and front-door model | How residents, tenants, businesses or members reach you, and what that requires of the systems behind it |
| Service design for a priority function | One service redesigned end to end as the pattern for the rest |
| Adoption plan | What has to happen for people to work the new way rather than the old one, and how you will know whether they are |
| Implementation roadmap | Sequence, dependencies, capacity required and the decisions that gate each stage |
| Benefits framework | What the change is expected to produce, and how it will be evidenced |
If reorganisation is under way, operating model work bought too early gets overtaken and bought too late gets rushed. The usable window is after the structure decision and before the implementation plan is committed, which is typically nine to fifteen months before vesting.
We will say so if you are outside it.
Tell us what’s on your desk.
If we are the right two people for it, we will say so. If we are not, we will say who is.
hello@votragroup.co.uk