Services
Operating Model & Organisational Design
Design how the company runs. Then make it run that way.
Most companies do not choose their structure. They grow into it. Roles get created around whoever was available at the time, decisions keep routing through the two or three people who built the business, and coordination happens by phone because it always has.
That works better than it should, for longer than it should, and then it stops. Adding people stops adding capacity. Two units compete for the same production line with no rule to settle it. The owner becomes the only integration mechanism the company has.
The strategy is usually fine. The company is simply not arranged to carry it.
When companies call us
You are the bottleneck and you know it.
Nothing significant moves without you, and your calendar proves it. You have tried delegating, and it came back.
You have grown past your structure.
The company is two or three times the size it was when the current arrangement was invented, and nobody has redesigned it since.
Two parts of the business fight over the same resource.
Production capacity, the technical team, the best salespeople. There is no rule, so it gets settled by whoever escalates hardest.
You are about to add something the structure cannot absorb.
A second site, a new factory, a new business unit, a first market outside the country. You can already see it will not fit.
You want the group to behave like a group.
Several companies under common ownership, no clear profit and loss per unit, and no agreement on what the centre does and what the businesses decide for themselves.
You have the documents and not the behaviour.
Someone wrote the procedures, the org chart exists, and the company still runs exactly the way it did before. This one is more common than the other five combined, and it is the one we find most interesting.
What we do
- Operating model design.
- What sits in the centre and what sits in the business, how work flows between them, and where the profit and loss actually lands.
- Organisational structure and reporting.
- The chart, the span of control, the role definitions, and a deliberate decision about which roles are new rather than renamed.
- Decision rights.
- Who decides what, at what value, in which forum, and what happens when two people both believe it is theirs.
- Process redesign.
- Current state mapped from evidence rather than from what people say happens, then the target state, with the pain points named rather than smoothed over.
- Standard work and procedures.
- Written for the person who uses them on a Tuesday, not for an auditor. Short sentences, named owners, concrete timings.
- Coordination mechanisms.
- Internal service levels, standing forums, escalation rules. The machinery that replaces the owner’s telephone.
- Multi-site and franchise replication.
- Making a concept work at a distance from the people who invented it, which is a governance problem long before it is a manual problem.
- Sales and operations planning.
- Getting sales, purchasing and production onto one set of numbers, so profitability stops depending on heroics at month end.
- Transition and adoption.
- Sequencing, readiness gates, the recruitment plan, and what gets measured to prove the new arrangement is genuinely in use.
How the work runs
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Analyse.
We interview every senior leader individually, because the version of a company you get in a group is not the real one. We map how work actually flows, look at who reports to whom and how many, read the numbers by business line, and benchmark against companies at the size you are heading towards rather than the size you are now.
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Decide.
We put three structure options on the table, never one, each with what it costs and what it gives up. We stress-test them against real situations from your own business, specifically the ones that currently go wrong. Then you decide. A structure the owner did not choose gets abandoned the first time it becomes inconvenient.
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Build.
The chart, the role profiles, the decision rights, the procedures, the internal service levels, the measures for each unit, the recruitment plan. This is the part that used to take months and now takes weeks, for reasons we set out below.
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Sustain.
The part most engagements quietly skip. Readiness gates before each phase, named non-negotiables, a supervisory routine so that somebody one level up actually checks, a measurement rhythm, and a review at twelve months that asks what changed rather than what was delivered.
What AI changes here
Producing the documentation is no longer the hard part. Process maps, role profiles, procedures and analysis that used to take weeks now take days, and we see no reason to pretend otherwise.
That has created a new problem, and it is worth naming plainly. When documents become cheap, they multiply. Companies across this region now receive restructuring packs, procedure libraries and process maps at a volume nobody could have produced three years ago, and the adoption rate has not moved at all.
A company that ignored forty pages will ignore eight hundred more efficiently.
The reason is never the documents. Adoption requires four things that no quantity of paper can create: somebody with the authority to enforce the new way of working, a consequence when it is not followed, a supervisor one level up who actually checks, and a measure that makes usage visible. Remove any one of the four and the organisation reverts within a quarter, however good the design was.
So the time that AI freed goes straight back into exactly that. We design engagements with readiness gates rather than a handover date. We agree the non-negotiables before the first document is written. And the supervisory routine and the measurement sit inside the transition plan, rather than being left for the company to invent after we have gone.
We do not let a model decide anything about a named person’s role, and nothing reaches you that a consultant has not read.
Operating model and organisational design in Kosovo and the Balkans
We do this work with companies in Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia and across the region, and with international groups building a presence here. Manufacturers, retailers, construction and fit-out businesses, holdings with several companies under one owner, and multi-site operations.
The pattern repeats with remarkable consistency. A company grew quickly on the energy of a few people, and now needs to run on something more durable than their availability.
Work is delivered in Albanian or English. Procedures and operating documents are written in the language of the people who use them, which in Kosovo usually means Albanian.
Related work
What you get
- A diagnostic report with the findings, the capability gaps and the initial recommendation.
- Three operating model options with trade-offs, and a recorded decision.
- An organisational chart with role profiles, including the roles that do not exist yet.
- A decision rights matrix.
- Current and target state process maps for the core chains.
- Written procedures and standard work.
- Internal service levels between units.
- A measurement set per business unit.
- A transition plan with phases and gates.
- A recruitment plan with profiles and priorities.
- A change communication plan.
- And the design of the twelve-month review.
Common questions
How long does this take?
The design phase typically runs eight to twelve weeks, from first interviews to a validated structure. Adoption is a longer horizon, usually six to twelve months, and it is where most of the effort goes. Anyone quoting you a redesign that finishes when the document is delivered is quoting for the easy half.
Do you only advise, or do you implement?
Both, and we treat implementation as part of the engagement rather than as a separate proposal. The most common failure in organisational work is not a poor design. It is a good design handed to a company with nothing in place to absorb it. That is why our engagements carry readiness gates rather than a handover date.
What size of company is this for?
Typically between forty and several thousand people. Below that, structure is rarely the real problem. The most common profile is a company of between fifty and three hundred people that is two growth steps past the way it is arranged.
What happens to people during a restructuring?
Structural work makes some roles change and occasionally makes some roles unnecessary, and we will not tell you otherwise. What we insist on is that decisions about individuals are made by you, on the basis of evidence, with a plan for how they are communicated. We design the structure. We do not decide who occupies it.
We have no documented processes at all. Is that a problem?
No. It is the normal starting position, and it is often an advantage, because there is nothing to unlearn. The first phase maps what actually happens rather than what a previous document claimed happened.
In which languages do you work?
English and Albanian, and Italian where an engagement requires it. Client-facing operating documents are produced in Albanian by default, with terminology held consistent across every document in the engagement.
Operating model work sits inside a wider sequence: analyse the business honestly, decide the direction with the owner, build the structure and the people to carry it, then sustain it until the company runs it without us.