How to Group the Tasks of an Organization

A design project starts with the discovery stage. In this stage, the current context of the organization in question is explored. This includes the strategic objectives of the organization, its high-level value chain, the current organization design, and the strengths and weaknesses of the current way of organizing. Besides an exploration of the current context, the desired future state needs to be described as part of the discovery stage. A final aspect of the discovery stage is setting the conditions for the design process, in terms of negotiables and nonnegotiables, HR policies, and design governance. At the end of the discovery stage, the design criteria can be developed, which describe what the organization design should achieve. With the deliverables of the discovery stage, the necessary ingredients are in place for the grouping stage. In this stage, the structure of the organization is designed by creating autonomous clusters of tasks. Different grouping dimensions (activity, output, customer, or geography) can be used for this. Grouping works recursively from the macro level down to the meso level, until the lowest-level units are small enough to be allocated to one team. As a final step, the ancillary and support tasks need to be allocated.