How to redesign a business’s enabling functions

By Matthew Rogozinski

Together, enabling functions (e.g. Risk, Finance, HR, Technology, Procurement, Legal and Communications) provide essential support for the profit-generating or community-serving elements of an enterprise or government agency. These functions are often the subject of redesign efforts, whether in response to an external or internal review that recommends changes to organisational culture, processes and risk management, or as the result of regulatory change. They might also be redesigned to bring them into line with changes to the broader organisation (e.g. the introduction of agile, as discussed in our Getting More from Agile-at-scale article), to better support business needs, or to lift productivity.

So, how can an enabling function best redesign itself or be redesigned to better meet challenges or grasp opportunities? First, we believe self-directed redesign is likely to be the most effective approach. The best way to do this is by bringing together representative groups of mixed-seniority staff from across the function and the broader organisation in a series of collaborative workshops designed to answer some fundamental questions. This will promote an internal customer focus and understanding, as well as ownership and accountability for delivering reform among those staff members who will lead the change. Ultimately, this is why this type of redesign succeeds. External practice and inputs on the function performance should inform the workshops.

The fundamental issues the workshops should resolve go to the function’s future model on the one hand and how it will be made operational on the other. From our experience, a ‘first principles’ approach is the most efficient and effective way to address these questions, rather than an attempt to devise specific solutions to individual issues.

These fundamental issues include: function’s purpose, role and accountability; targeted performance against key areas of accountability over the relevant time frame; strategies to achieve the targeted performance; operating model and resourcing; the new or improved capabilities needed to make the strategies operational; the approach to and plan for the capability development; and the required budget.

The function leader should actively support the workshop efforts. The workshop facilitator should be capable of ensuring robust, inclusive, productive, fact-based debate; constructively challenging established ways of thinking; injecting externally-sourced expertise when required; and, importantly, ensuring participants reach agreed, documentable outcomes.

After this series of workshops, the function will have:

• A blueprint that clearly defines its purpose and role in terms of accountabilities, the performance it is targeting over time, the strategies it will deploy, the capabilities it needs to develop, the plan for the capability build, including change management within the function and the broader organisation, and the budget required;

• A basis for communication with the internal and external stakeholders (e.g. CEO, other business units, regulators) about the function direction and the progress it is making to the target state; and

• Perhaps most importantly, organisational understanding and ownership of the function blueprint and change plan, and accountability for its delivery, achieved through broad and deep engagement in their development.

If you are interested in knowing more about this enabling function redesign method, please contact Inhance Partners.