Organisational Design
Practical organisational design that aligns capability, accountability and customer outcomes.
Need organisational design advice and would like to learn more about our expertise?
The problem we solve
Organisational design is more than an org chart. It’s the deliberate alignment of strategy, structure, roles, accountabilities, and governance. Poor design slows decision-making, hides bottlenecks, weakens accountability, and increases operating costs.
As organisations grow through new markets, digital transformation, acquisition, or scale-up, legacy structures quickly become a barrier to value creation. Common symptoms we see include:
Unclear responsibilities and decision-making authority
Inefficient reporting lines and duplicated functions
Misalignment of roles with strategic priorities
Silos that slow collaboration and accountability
Hidden factories, where inefficient and unproductive work takes place
Lack of clarity around capabilities and workforce deployment
Poor alignment of systems, processes and structure and culture
Left unaddressed, these issues compound. They manifest as slower execution, rising operating costs, increased people risk, diminished customer experience and growing frustration among leadership teams and employees alike. Moreover, they result in organisations that are not competitive and less attractive to investors.
Auscorporate helps organisations identify and resolve these structural constraints by designing organisational models that restore clarity, accountability and momentum, enabling strategy to be executed effectively.
Our approach - The Auscorporate Organisational Design Framework
We take a strategy-led, execution-focused approach to organisational design. As practitioners who have built, led and governed organisations ourselves, we do not start with theoretical operating models or idealised org charts. We start by understanding how your business actually works and how decisions are made, where accountability sits, and how customers are served.
Our approach recognises that organisational design is not an academic exercise. Poorly designed structures create confusion, slow execution, and dilute responsibility. Effective design creates clarity, speed and ownership. We focus on designing organisations that leaders can run, teams can understand, and boards can govern.
We believe good organisational design must be simple, explainable and durable. If a structure cannot be clearly communicated to the organisation, it will not be adopted. Over-engineered designs often collapse under operational pressure. Our work prioritises clarity of roles, decision rights and interfaces, ensuring the organisation can execute consistently as it grows or changes.
Recognising that organisations evolve, our designs are built to be adaptable rather than brittle. Growth, acquisitions, new markets and regulatory change all test organisational structures. We design with flexibility in mind, enabling scalable growth without redesign or disruption.
Our approach is collaborative, practical and tailored. There is no one-size-fits-all model. Every organisational design engagement is shaped by your strategy, culture, risk profile and operating reality. We work closely with founders, executives and boards to ensure alignment, accountability and confidence in execution.
Who we work with
Our clients come from diverse backgrounds and industries, seeking our support to solve unfamiliar challenges or to augment their experience during critical periods of growth or transformation. We advise boards, executive teams, business owners and entrepreneurs as they scale their businesses, navigate major transactions or pursue significant strategic objectives.
We predominantly work with mid-market companies, high-growth scale-ups, and founder-led organisations generating between $2 million and $200 million in annual revenue. Our clients operate across sectors such as technology, defence and national security, advanced manufacturing, digital services, medical and health, resources, and professional services, among others.
We partner with leadership teams, boards, founders and investors who require external strategic clarity, independent thinking and structured planning to guide their next phase of growth or prepare for a major capital event.
What we deliver
Within the Auscorporate Strategic Organisational Design Framework, we deliver strategic clarity to clients seeking independent advice and input on their organisational design, or to develop a new one. We provide dAuscorporate’s organisational design engagements typically include:
Diagnostic and assessment
Current state mapping of structure, roles and accountabilities
Analysis of decision rights, governance and reporting lines
Identification of capability, workload and performance gaps
Financial modelling of organisational costs, including productivity measures as part of our CFO Advisory Services
Target operating model
Design of future state structure aligned with strategy and goals
Role and capability definitions mapped to outcomes
Identification of key enablers (systems, processes, metrics)
Decision-making and governance frameworks, including the design of Authority Matrix models
Alignment with ISO9001
Implementation support
Change planning and stakeholder alignment
Workforce redeployment strategies
Transition governance and risk mitigation
Monitoring and refinement plans
Why engage us?
Organisational design only works when it is strategically anchored, commercially viable, and executable. Auscorporate brings a unique blend of commercial experience and execution capability that separates us from traditional consultancies:
Strategy-to-execution orientation: We design organisations that can actually deliver on strategy, not just theoretically optimised structures.
Board-level insight: We understand organisational dynamics at the executive and governance levels, ensuring alignment with investor, board and stakeholder expectations.
Commercial pragmatism: Designs that balance ambition with operational reality and cost discipline.
Mid-market focus: Experience shaping structures where resources must be tightly aligned to outcomes and strategic priorities.
Expert d: Experience shaping structures where resources must be tightly aligned to outcomes and strategic priorities.
Case Studies
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Case 1 | Group Organisational Design - Technology Services Client
Auscorporate advised a founder-led professional services group operating across multiple legal entities in Australia and offshore. Rapid growth and acquisitions had outpaced the organisation’s structure, resulting in unclear accountability, duplicated functions, and an increasing reliance on founders for operational decision-making. While the businesses were technically part of a group, they were not operating as a cohesive enterprise.
Working with the board and executive team, Auscorporate undertook a group-level organisational design review focused on execution, governance and scalability. We mapped how decisions, accountability and work actually flowed across the group, identified structural friction and “hidden factory” activity, and clarified the appropriate role of the group versus operating entities.
Auscorporate designed a clear group operating model that aligned structure, capability and decision rights with strategic priorities. This included redefining reporting lines, centralising selected group functions with clear service boundaries, clarifying executive accountability and establishing decision pathways that reduced founder dependency while strengthening governance.
The redesigned structure improved decision-making speed, reduced duplication and enabled better deployment of capability across the group. Most importantly, the organisation moved from operating as a collection of related entities to functioning as a cohesive, governable group — positioned to scale, integrate future acquisitions and support long-term growth.
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Case 2 | SFIA-aligned organisational design - Ai Technology Client
Auscorporate advised a fast-growing technology company transitioning from product development into sustained commercial delivery. While the organisation had strong technical depth, its structure had evolved organically. Roles were loosely defined, accountability between development, delivery, and operations was unclear, and leadership had limited visibility into whether workforce capability was aligned with the organisation’s next stage of growth.
Auscorporate undertook a capability-led organisational design, using the SFIA framework as a reference point to objectively map roles, responsibilities and skill levels across the organisation. This enabled leadership to move beyond job titles and assess how individual capability aligned with role expectations, decision authority and remuneration benchmarks. The process quickly surfaced a concentration of capability in development functions, alongside emerging gaps in delivery management, service operations and scalability-critical roles.
Using these insights, Auscorporate designed a future-state organisational model that aligned structure, decision rights and accountability with the company’s strategic priorities. The design clarified leadership roles, reset reporting lines, and established clearer separation between build, deliver and operate functions. Importantly, SFIA was used as a practical reference point, and not as a rigid template supporting practical role design, capability uplift planning and targeted hiring decisions rather than wholesale restructuring.
The outcome was a scalable organisational design grounded in real capability, not assumptions. Leadership gained clear visibility over workforce strengths and gaps, reduced execution risk as customer demand increased, and established a credible roadmap for organisational maturity. The business moved forward with confidence that its structure, capability and strategy were aligned, enabling growth without introducing unnecessary complexity or cost.
FAQs
What is organisational design, and how is it different from restructuring?
Organisational design is a strategic exercise that aligns structure, roles, decision rights and capability to support the execution of strategy. Restructuring is often in response to a business need to reduce costs or headcount. Auscorporate approaches organisational design as a proactive, strategy-led process that improves clarity, accountability and performance; with restructuring only considered where it supports broader strategic outcomes. You can find out more about restructuring here.
When should a business consider organisational design?
Organisational design is most effective when undertaken before problems occur. Common triggers include rapid growth, entry into new markets, digital transformation, acquisitions, leadership changes or persistent execution issues. Our clients engage Auscorporate when decision-making slows, accountability becomes unclear, or costs rise without corresponding performance improvement.
How do you ensure a structure supports the organisation?
Our approach is grounded in real operating context decision flows, capability, workload and culture. We prioritise simplicity, clarity and execution, ensuring designs can be understood, adopted and governed in day-to-day operations.
Isn’t organisation design just an org chart?
An org chart is an output, not the objective of organisational design. Our work focuses on accountability, decision rights, capability alignment and governance. Organisational design without these elements often fails. We ensure structure, roles, processes and systems work together to support performance and customer outcomes.
Advisory and consulting, what’s the difference?
As advisors, we take a proactive, long-term role in guiding our clients.
We draw on deep commercial, financial and operational experience to help shape decisions, anticipate issues and influence outcomes over time. Our work extends beyond a single task or deliverable; it is about providing strategic clarity, independent thinking and continuous support as businesses navigate growth, complexity and major inflection points.
Consultants, by contrast, are typically engaged to complete a defined piece of work within a set timeframe — a report, a model, a process review or a specific project. Their role is often task-focused and transactional. Advisors operate in a different space: we work in the grey areas, helping clients determine what needs to be done, why, and in what order, often setting the direction for specialist consultants, legal practitioners, accountants and other providers.
What if my organisation is a group, not just one company?
We regularly advise organisations operating across multiple entities, subsidiaries and jurisdictions. Our approach considers group governance, employment and operating structures, risk allocation and consistency of decision-making across the group, ensuring the organisation can scale without unnecessary complexity or fragmentation.
Organisational design is particularly critical in a group context. Groups do not function effectively simply by virtue of being grouped together — they require deliberate design, clear accountability and aligned operating models to perform as a cohesive enterprise rather than a collection of separate entities.
Do you work with Start-ups?
Yes. We regularly work with founders and early-stage teams to help them articulate plans that can be clearly understood by employees, investors and other key stakeholders. Strategic planning in an entrepreneurial context is energising because there are many variables, opportunities and pathways to consider, and founders often benefit from structured guidance to bring clarity to the chaos.
What we bring to a startup is deep experience in investor expectations, capital markets, commercial modelling and financial pragmatism.
We help founders strike the right balance between ambition and execution, ensuring their ideas are supported by credible plans, clear milestones and realistic resource requirements, all while maintaining the optimism and drive that makes start-ups successful.
Can organisational design reduce cost without compromising performance?
When done properly, it can. Effective organisational design removes duplication, clarifies accountability and surfaces hidden inefficiencies. Cost reduction is often a by-product of the design process.
Do you offer a fractional advisory model for organisational design, and what does it cost?
Our retained model provides ongoing, on-demand access to organisational design advisory support at a fixed monthly fee, scaled to the organisation’s size and complexity. This approach delivers cost certainty, continuity of insight and faster decision-making, without the overhead of a full-time role or ad hoc professional fees. Scope and cadence are tailored to the client’s needs and growth stage.