We are seeing a strong trend, particularly in our financial services clients, towards building a much more integrated back office operation. IT / HR and other services are experiencing rapid organization change, cost pressure and often outsourcing.

These are all rational responses in the search for greater efficiencies and can lead to improvements in cost and service levels.

There are however risks. It is common for the early stages of integrated back office implementations to focus on structure and systems changes and to ignore skills.

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Mar 18 2009

One of the common problems we see in our matrix management training and consulting is that matrix management is taken too far down the organization.

We worked with a financial services organization last year who wanted to implement matrix management in an organization of 1500 people. By the time we had identified the people who had purely local jobs (80 -90% of people in even the most global organizations) and the people in the middle who managed them, we identified less than 100 people where matrix management would add value and be necessary.

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Mar 18 2009

In today’s current economic climate, there is an increased focus by many companies on maximising cost savings through significant investments in Lean and Six Sigma programs. However a recent article in The McKinsey Quarterly (November 2008 From Lean to lasting; Making Operational Improvements Stick) estimates that many companies are achieving less than 50% of the potential savings from Lean and Six Sigma processes by failing to pay sufficient attention to the soft skills required to embed them into the organizational culture.

Part of the reason for this is that many Lean and Six Sigma initiatives are focused on production and manufacturing processes where there is a tendency to prefer quantitative, statistical results as the yardstick through which we measure success.

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Mar 11 2009

Fortune magazine has released its twelfth annual rankings of FORTUNE World’s Most Admired Companies (WMACs). Many of them are our clients so it is good to see their success recognized.

This year’s they also looked at how organizational design and operating models help WMACs build more effective organizations than their peers.

They found a wide range of different structures and levels of centralization or decentralization. The most effective were ones that matched the company’s strategies and enabled them to react flexibly in different situations. There is no “one size fits all best structure”

They also concluded that it is people, not organizations, that execute strategies and the admired companies do more to enable their leaders to be effective. They provide the tools and better equip their leaders to work in this more cross-functional, horizontal way

“83 percent of MAC executives feel that they manage the matrix organization effectively, compared to only 58 percent of the peer group?” says Hay Group’s David Tait, who also worked on the research – see the Hay article in full.

Nice to see further confirmation that it is the people skills, not the structure, that makes the difference between success and failure in complex organizations.

Mar 10 2009

We are getting a lot of searches coming to the blog looking for a matrix management presentation.  Several are browsing the catogiries but not finding the specific materials that may be of most help in building a matrix management presentation.

Have a look at the matrix management presentation on our sister site Global Integration. It covers the issues that we see in working in complex companies. It is based around our 4Cs and explains the five panels of the image below

This matrix management presentation is a flash movie with sound so don’t forget to turn on your audio. Click “view presentation” at our resources page.

Mar 02 2009

Many global HR organizations have adopted the Ulrich model of specialists and HR business partners. In doing so they have introduced the complexities of matrix management into their HR organization, often without giving people the skills required to mange this form of working.

For specialists in the global HR organization there is still a strong functional reporting line but their internal customers the HR business partners are typically more numerous and demanding.

The HR business partners in the global HR organization are much more embedded in their client organizations. They sit on management teams and operational groups. They often support two or more organizations and find themselves stretched between the needs of their clients and the needs of the functional structure to drive HR projects and priorities.

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Mar 02 2009

A number of our clients have seen their climate survey / opinion survey results deteriorate this year.

It’s hardly surprising in a tough economic climate that the messages of doom and gloom people read every day result in greater uncertainty and concern about job prospects.

In general, climate and opinion survey results reflect the overall level of performance of the organization – when things are going well most scores are influenced positively, and vice versa when things are not going so well.

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Feb 26 2009

I came across a couple of posts about the matrix organization at Yahoo. They are pretty critical of the matrix there and mention symptoms including “a horrible gridlock in decision making”, lack of accountability, turnover of good people who felt they had not got the authority they needed and lack of accountability. Read the full post on Yahoo’s Matrix

The second post about Yahoo’s management structure speculates about a forthcoming organization change and talks approvingly of a return to more directive “take charge”, “top down” style of management.

My first observations that the symptoms they talk about are NOT inevitable in a matrix organization – if these symptoms are accurately reported they are symptoms of a badly implemented and run matrix where people do not seem to have the skills to manage the complexity. This is not uncommon but is not the fault of the structure itself.

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Feb 25 2009

Listen to the latest podcast in our Life in a Matrix series: the subject is Global Account Management.

Global accounts have become common in large global organizations and their suppliers. Find out what makes a global account, what is different about global account management, and how to manage the marked step up in complexity that successful global account management requires.

Listen to the global account management podcast

Feb 23 2009

In this podcast Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration, discusses global account management.  Global account management has become common in large global organizations and their suppliers but it represents a real step up in complexity from national accounts or other local key accounts management.

Global accounts managers need to be able to cope with complex customers, manage the complexity of their own organizations (which can be harder) and deliver service and sales through matrix and virtual teams – often without traditional hierarchical authority.

A lot of global account management training focuses on sales ability but we also need to recognize and build the new skill levels required for this additional level of business complexity. In this podcast Kevan talks about what makes a global account and what are the key drivers of complexity in managing complex global account teams.

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Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for this site so we can let you know when future editions arrive. You can get the show through iTunes here.

Find out more about our  and our approach to global accounts management and teams training, see other posts on global account management at http://www.global-integration.com

Feb 23 2009