Optimizing the Management System
It’s Monday morning. A glance at the calendar reveals: deadlines, meetings, coordination tasks. A look at the inbox: vacation applications, proposals for exceeding the project budget, a request to review a presentation, invitations to join brainstormings and steering groups.
So, when do you do your real work?
Of course, all of the above is, in essence, work. Nevertheless, most corporate leaders seem to ask themselves this question on a regular basis. They often have the feeling that the whole company is much too much concerned with internal workings.
Rules, regulations, meeting structures, processes, guidelines – these are all indispensable when it comes to helping everyone coordinate and be productive. Yet, in dynamic times like these, such management practices often fail to correspond to the ever-changing and exacting demands put on the creation of value. In the end, they can effectively become roadblocks to success.
Our goal is to optimize your management system in close cooperation with you and your staff. First, we analyze your practices, rules, leadership systems, competencies and authorization guidelines, that is, all those things a company enacts to regulate its internal affairs. In close cooperation with your entire organization, we strive to detect what is amiss and what is worth saving – and only then do we advance to formulating new practices and discarding superfluous ones.
The overall effort required to fine-tune internal affairs declines, and responsibility is displaced to where it can best be deployed. The organization can catch its breath and better reorient itself to the market. Altogether: more time for value creation and meaningful activities.
Do you have questions?
»We were a rapidly growing high-tech company and were always being confronted with the challenge of adapting our organization and our procedures to enable us to maintain our agility and increase our stability. Organeers helped us to achieve this balancing act and adopt a very pragmatic approach that fits our team.«
Dr. Tobias Schelter, CEO
AVL SET GmbH
We were a rapidly growing high-tech company and were always being confronted with the challenge of adapting our organization and our procedures to enable us to maintain our agility and increase our stability.
Organeers helped us to achieve this balancing act and adopt a very pragmatic approach that fits our team. Especially the basics, like differentiating between complex and complicated themes, were a great help to our still very young staff. This enabled us to simultaneously divide up the tasks in a project to facilitate a sustainable development of new themes and to execute customer projects that depend on those developments without causing conflicts.
Because of the broad acceptance of this situation, we initially learned how to organize themes in clearly defined projects and setups, which allowed us to remain at once stable and agile during the sales stage, the creation of quotes, and project execution, while maintaining the many links between these phases. These interactions, and all the processes in-between, produced long-lasting improvements in the cooperation between areas such as development and marketing, which traditionally suffered from “tense” relations.
All in all, we became better able to react to customers’ wishes and queries much more quickly and adequately, which in turn solidified our market position.
»Regarding the special projects, the jointly agreed framework and budgets as well as the restructured decision-making powers generated betters results with shorter leadtimes. «
Case: Reporting in sales / special projects
Andreas Schönfeld, CEO Sales
Spartherm Feuerungstechnik GmbH
Our company, Spartherm, has grown very quickly over the past 10 years. This led to some processes being neglected and some internal and external workflows getting “stuck.” In a workshop with Organeers we looked carefully at our marketing reporting and the consequences it had for the entire organization. Also, we were able to better structure and optimize how special projects were completed.
In the end, integrating the documented sales reporting into a constructive exchange with all relevant stakeholders gave our marketing people the feeling that their needs were understood: Everyone could react quickly and concretely to their queries. A further result was holding moderated meetings that had clear structures and goals, making us more agile and more efficient. The staff members of all departments involved could now be informed quickly and more pointedly about what is going on in the marketplace, which in turn produced a greater understanding of our customers, a more targeted implementation of our products, and an improved overall performance.
Regarding the special projects, the jointly agreed framework and budgets as well as the restructured decision-making powers generated betters results with shorter leadtimes. During the entire duration of a project, the need for coordination was reduced enormously, saving both time and money. Furthermore, those directly affected by the respective project now bear the responsibility, that is, instead of simply transferring the responsibility to the senior member of the project management team, now the person with the best grasp of the matter and the best ideas for its realization is appointed. That not only distributes the responsibility to more shoulders, it also unburdens the highest levels of management and promotes self-responsibility among the team members.
From the very first encounter on, working with the Organeers has been a great collaborative and positive experience. They possess the gift of being able to put themselves in the position of individual employees and the entire company. Together, we identified urgent themes, and our advisor competently led us to discover plausible solutions. The implementation of the workshops and the identification of the company’s “pain points” as well as the incorporation of changes were individually tailored while still specific. From my vantage point, Organeers was able to involve the entire team from the respective process, giving them the feeling of being respected and understood. Working with Organeers was always flexible and again and again readjusted to fit the challenges that cropped up. Even the challenging task of working through difficult matters remained a source of joy for everyone involved. My sincerest thanks!
»Today, it is my firm conviction that we really do have good people at our disposal – we were just keeping them from showing their peak performance. Amazingly, just adjusting a few things here and few things there was able to release a tremendous amount of creative energy.«
Case in sales: Abolition of individual commissions and conversion of KPIs
Linnar Schwarz, COO
Candis GmbH
In our case, the commissions being paid out to the Sales Department had grown continually over time. We weren’t acting alone – just doing what everyone else was doing. We never thought much about what we were doing was affecting the behavior of our own people, especially when dealing with contracts that paid no commission or were one-offs.
After working with Organeers on straightening out our wage system and key performance indicators, we decided to get rid of the individual commissions and instituted team goals. We also set the fixed wages at a relatively high level. This made a great difference when talk turned to defining our goals, since you didn’t get bogged down with endless discussions but could concentrate on what was realistically implementable. We noticed this immediately when defining our sales targets for 2021. Further, parallel to revamping our wage structure, we expanded the overall sales teams and made the Sales Department, the Marketing Department and the Support Department members of the team responsible for realizing our sales goals.
We also eliminated all other key performance indicators oriented solely toward individual activities. Our feeling was that they were only sidetracking everyone and effectively inhibiting our own people. We now leave it to the team members to decide how to complete the task in a way that adds to our revenue. As it turns out, that made them much more open, and they now interact more to the advantage of the product.
Today, it is my firm conviction that we really do have good people at our disposal – we were just keeping them from showing their peak performance. Amazingly, just adjusting a few things here and few things there was able to release a tremendous amount of creative energy.
