business – marketing
The seven principles of
Peter Huskins
Joint Director of
ShopAbility
A career retailer who
is widely known and
respected in the
Australian FMCG industry
with extensive experience
in departmet stores, DDS,
liquor and supermarkets.
Peter has been working
with suppliers and
retailers developing
business, category,
customer and channel
strategy and competitive
points of difference for
almost 10 years.
Peter Huskins
M: +61 412 574 793
E: peter@shop-ability.com.au
The Shopportunity offer
extends across insight
development, strategy,
implementation, capability
and training.
Shopportunity offers
training courses for
marketers, including
shopper insights training
and a shopper marketing
fundamentals course.
Two fully hosted retail
study tours to the US
are also being offered
for May 2008. For more
information, visit www.
sh-opportunity.com.au.
30 Retail World June 20, 2011
a successful restructure
ShopAbility has teamed
up with the Bevington
Group, Australia’s most
experienced process and
productivity improvement
specialists.
C
oupling the experience
of ShopAbility’s senior
strategy team, all of whom
have decades of CEO and Board
level experience in retail and FMCG
companies, with the Bevington
Group’s experience in improving
business operational processes,
we can deliver a unique suite
of services that centre on real
organisational insight using XeP3.
The organisational insight
approach using XeP3 consolidates
lessons from more than 400
assignments in some of Australia’s
largest and best-recognised
companies, and ShopAbility is
exclusively licensing Bevington
Group-patented technology and
expertise for use in the retail and
FMCG sector.
Here in our second of a series
of six insightful and interesting
articles, Roger Perry the CEO
of the Bevington Group discusses
the fundamental principles behind
restructuring your business in
a changing and improving
trading environment.
Even as the economic outlook “Flexibility applies not only to staff
appears to brighten, the fact
remains that many organisations members, but to staff capability.”
can no longer operate as they
have been. A key feature of this
changing landscape is the need for
organisations to restructure. behemoth, which then tries to are unavoidable, at least start
As process and structure matrix with local elements. with a clean and clear design that
specialists, Bevington Group has matches to strategy.
observed the good, the bad and 2. Reduce complexity 2. Avoid making leadership roles
the ugly of restructures. Based Simply put, complexity too complex (see principle #5)
on our experiences, we have costs. Whether it is a complex 3. Minimise the use of matrices.
devised seven broad restructuring organisational structure, a complex They introduce measurement
principles to help make any product offering, or complex overhead and a lack of clear
restructure a successful one. transactional processes, the added direction to staff.
These principles are: cost of complexity can be a drag
on performance. 3. Focus on core activity
1. Align structure To mitigate complexity, there are Remove noise (inefficiency in
to strategy three considerations that help with processes) and enhance core
All restructures must align to organisational design: before restructuring roles. This
strategy. This may seem self- 1. Design structure for strategy means that you will need to know
evident, yet a significant number before you design for specific what people are doing today by
of organisations fail to do so. personnel. Organisational obtaining a detailed understanding
For example, if local conditions redesigns that are a compromise of tasks by role.
are a predominant factor then between strategic intent and line This ensures that no value-
stress local sales and marketing management preferences inevitably added activities are thrown out
functions rather than a centralised add complexity. So, while politics when removing a role. Similarly,

duplication and redundant
activity can be removed at the
time of the restructure.
4. Create feasible roles
Don’t overload roles – restructures
generally leave an organisation
with fewer people to do the same
amount of work. When restructuring
to reduce headcount, make
sure you understand the current
workload of employees.
This will help to ensure you
design roles that are neither
too heavily laden nor, indeed,
too light. Furthermore, role design
must take into account realistic
groupings of skills. Packing a
role with too many distinct skill
sets reduces the pool of durable
candidates.
5. Balance ‘own work’
and supervisory load
of managers
The case of leadership or
‘management loading’ can
be particularly troublesome in
restructures. Often, the inability of
managers to focus on leadership
tasks due to increased output
requirements can create significant
problems for an organisation.
For example, time spent
mentoring and coaching
staff drops off: staff become
disengaged, more issues arise
due to staff errors and managers
end up spending more time
resolving them. To ensure
management are appropriately
loaded, it’s critical to balance
three elements:
marketing – business
1. The number of staff directly
managed or supervised
2. Staff ability to perform work
without supervision
3. The amount of ‘own work’
managers have to do on top of
their leadership activity.
6. Implement with clarity
Often there is confusion in the
first weeks and months after an
initial restructure. After all, who
is supposed to be responsible
for what? The answer is to clarify
roles and responsibilities from the
beginning, identify all functions
(activities, tasks, and decisions)
that have to be accomplished
for effective operation, clarify
who should be involved and be
specific about accountability.
Roger Perry
Managing Director
The Bevington Group is a
productivity improvement
service provider. The
Group was established
in 1993, and has refined
its methods in more
than 400 assignments.
Bevington’s core
services are: Process
Improvement and
Restructuring; Continuous
Improvement; and
Change Management.
7. Maintain flexibility
Finally, it is important not to cut
your resources too fine. If the
organisational change is material,
you will need resource flexibility in
the first few months, so even as you
strive to operate more efficiently, be
sure to give yourself some wriggle
room in your staffing.
Flexibility applies not only to staff
members, but to staff capability.
Leave yourself and your leadership
team some room to respond to
capability gaps in the new structure.
Common ways to do this
include a staged transition so
there are fewer capability gaps
to manage at a point in time,
and a temporary use of contract
resources until in-house staff
become familiar with their roles.
June 20, 2011 Retail World 31