What is the Organisational Structure Design service?
Organisational Structure Design, also known as team structure design, or
organisational design, turns a function’s operating requirements into a practical
organisational architecture: the roles required, what each role is accountable
for, what skills are required, seniority levels, reporting lines, geographical
distribution, and the order in which the team should be built.
What questions does the Organisational Structure Design service answer?
The Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service answers which roles,
scope, skills, expertise, and seniority this function needs to deliver its
operating objectives. What should the reporting lines look like, where can you
hire, and what should you hire for first?
Order matters. The senior expert who can deliver the roadmap is hired first. The high-potential person who will grow into the next role is hired second, once there is someone in the business able to develop them. Reverse the order and the business pays for a talented hire who cannot reach productivity at the rate the plan needs, and then loses them. The design recommends that sequence for every role in the structure.
The service is appropriate for the design of a new business function - or for a material redesign and reorganisation of an existing one.
What do you receive with the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service?
- Defined job families, job levelling (for individual contributor and people-manager roles), core job profiles, core job family competencies, and reporting lines
- Job descriptions for each role in the designed structure
- Primary accountabilities, autonomy, performance standard, and remit for each role & level
- Core skills & competencies requirements for each role & level
- Calibration meetings with function leaders (up to 2 per job family)
- Implementation handover for the named project sponsor
Who is the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service suitable for?
- A new function is being created in your business
- An existing function is scaling and role requests no longer form a coherent structure
- An existing function is being restructured and you need clear scope and levelling for the new target organisation
- Responsibilities currently overlap across existing roles and there is no scope and progression clarity
- A leadership change or market expansion alters the function’s requirements
- The operating plan requires a different team shape
Who should not buy the Organisational Structure Design service?
- The strategy and operating priorities are still materially undefined
- The principal question is how competitors structure the function. For this, we recommend our Competitive Talent Architecture Audit service instead.
- You only have 1-2 headcount in a particular specialism (e.g. only one HR Lead, or only one IT Manager). This service is relevant in cases where you have a requirement to build or restructure a job family/team where you anticipate the need for different levels of seniority.
What information does Talent Ascent require to deliver your team structure design?
This will vary based on the specific scope of the support your business needs.
Some guidelines for possible data and access we may require to deliver the
Organisational Structure Design service include:
- Strategic roadmap and current operating plan
- Required outcomes for the function
- Inventory of recurring work and key projects and programs
- Current role and structure information where a team already exists
- Known hand-offs, duplication and delivery constraints
- Key cross-functional dependencies with other teams
- Information (if available) on who handled this function’s scope previously
- Approved headcount parameters
- Current job or level materials where relevant
- Executive sponsor and implementation owner
What is the process to book the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service?
- Schedule an intro call with Talent Ascent to discuss your requirements.
- Talent Ascent will provide a quote proposal depending on the number of functions, job families, and roles you’d like to have in scope.
- Terms are agreed on project scope, and target function definitions and their required operating outcomes.
- Talent Ascent commences collaboration with your team once relevant access to systems/data is granted.
- Calibration meetings are scheduled with key stakeholders (function leaders, key line managers) to define the role mandates, levels and skill expectations.
- All discussions are aligned with the executive business sponsor to ensure design work is sequenced and prioritised against operating dependencies and approved headcount.
- Weekly progress updates provided to the executive business sponsor.
- Once final design is complete, Talent Ascent prepares a repository to hand over to your team.
- A 90-minute summary and handover meeting is scheduled with executive sponsor and your leadership team.
How much does the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design cost?
from £16,500 for one function.
Delivery time is estimated from five weeks for one function, subject to client team availability. Talent Ascent will provide a quote estimating delivery timelines and fees based on your specific business requirements. In the event of anticipated delays due to availability of your team, Talent Ascent will advise the executive sponsor accordingly as part of weekly progress updates.
How does the cost of the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service compare against a standard agency fee spend?
The starting scope for the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design is one
function. Role counts vary by engagement, so the table below uses an illustrative
eight-role structure and the scaling table shows the effect of a different size.
Talent Ascent can help you design clear team structure and job profiles before you begin hiring for your team - for approximately the cost an agency may charge you for filling only one of those positions.
Against agency spend on the roles in the designed structure (8 roles example, illustrative)
| Average base salary | Agency spend on 8 roles in the designed structure at 15% | at 20% | Our design starting fee | Our fee as % of that agency spend | Agency spend ÷ our fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £50,000 | £60,000 | £80,000 | £16,500 | 3.6–4.8× | |
| £60,000 | £72,000 | £96,000 | £16,500 | 4.4–5.8× | |
| £70,000 | £84,000 | £112,000 | £16,500 | 5.1–6.8× | |
| £80,000 | £96,000 | £128,000 | £16,500 | 5.8–7.8× | |
| £90,000 | £108,000 | £144,000 | £16,500 | 6.5–8.7× | |
| £100,000 | £120,000 | £160,000 | £16,500 | 7.3–9.7× | |
| £120,000 | £144,000 | £192,000 | £16,500 | 8.7–11.6× |
Effective cost per role designed
| Roles in scope | Our fee | Effective cost per role designed |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | £16,500 | £4,125 |
| 6 | £16,500 | £2,750 |
| 8 | £16,500 | £2,063 |
| 10 | £16,500 | £1,650 |
| 12 | £16,500 | £1,375 |
How does the Organisational Structure Design compare with the Competitive Talent Architecture Audit?
Organisational Structure Design creates the client’s own organisational structure
tailored to the client’s specific operating requirements.
The Competitive Talent Architecture Audit delivers insights and benchmarking on how six external companies built a comparable function.
What are the alternatives to the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service?
| Route | What you get | Typical cost | When it’s the better choice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founder-drawn org chart | A fast structure from first principles | Internal time | The function size is small, the founder knows the domain deeply, and mis-hires are cheap to correct |
| Internal HR team | An in-house built org structure - possibly at a slower pace if your HR team covers a broad scope of ongoing regular tasks such as payroll, performance management, and employee relations | Salary and internal time | Suitable if your HR team has sufficient bandwidth and building the new team is not urgent |
| Generalist HR consultant | Broad people-practice support including structure input | Day rate fees | You need generalist HR help across many topics at once |
| Large consultancy firm organisational design | Enterprise-scale methodology and change management which may not be portable in a high-growth scale-up context | Quoted project fees | You are restructuring a whole organisation, and your employee population is significant enough to require the scale of engagement |
| Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design | Roles, levels, competencies, reporting lines and hiring sequence for one function, tailored to your roadmap, with job descriptions delivered | from £16,500 | A function must scale correctly and fast, the context your business operates in shifts dynamically, or you are building a brand new function. You want a team structure designed tailormade to your commercial roadmap and operational reality, not a standardised blueprint |
FAQ
Can the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service be used for a new function?
Yes. Designing a new team is one of the clearest use cases for the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service.
Does the Talent Ascent Organisational Structure Design service assess current employees?
No. The Organisational Structure Design service builds the blueprint for roles and the function your business requires - scope, levelling, key competencies. During calibration meetings with your leadership team, we may collect qualitative insight from function and executive leaders on historic function performance (in cases of organisational redesign). However, we do not look at individual employee performance data or employment decisions concerning current employees.
Who implements the Organisational Structure Design built by Talent Ascent?
The Organisational Structure Design is implemented by the client’s nominated implementation owner and relevant functional leaders, together with your HR Leads. Talent Ascent supplies the target organisational structure & role materials, and handover. If you do not currently have a nominated implementation owner, Talent Ascent can offer Fractional Hiring Leadership and stay on to support with implementation.