Organizational Diagnostics as a method of improving the company
Often, the work of consultants in the organization of the customer reminds the notorious doctor’s appointment, when a patient “diagnosed in medicine”, who independently diagnoses, requires immediate effective treatment from the doctor. So the owner believes that he himself knows the weak points of his company and he needs only immediate effective actions to eliminate them. And the help of the employees of the consulting company specialists consists mainly in getting involved in a dispute about how the word marketing should be pronounced, which does not play any role for their daily practice, but they limit its functions by studying the prices of competitors in order to offer lower prices. than market, believing that thereby will ensure the competitiveness of their goods. However, the task of organizational diagnostics does not boil down to tightening the competences of the customer’s staff to the required level, but consists in deep “immersion” of consultants in the customer’s organization; review the workflow, conduct an audit of staff, examine the processes in progress, in order to develop standard techniques for their improvement and give comprehensive advice to eliminate deficiencies. Recommendations made by business consultants do not impose their opinion on the manager, but are the result of reviewing the overall activities of the organization.
The lack of a certain sequence in the conduct of organizational diagnostics does not mean the superficiality of the process; rather, it resembles the children’s game “Mosaic”, when a holistic conceived picture is built up from the total mass of the scattered details of the individual puzzles. Now let’s take a closer look at the constituent components of organizational diagnostics and indicate what the consultants are paying attention to:
1. Marketing activities – construction of a sales system is considered and advertising activity is analyzed.
2. Construction of production processes – the effectiveness of all processes is studied and the possibility of their improvement is established.
3. Logistics – it is determined how well accounting and movement of goods is maintained.
4. Financial activity – if we are talking about a small company, we can restrict ourselves to studying the accounting functions of accounting. At the same time, if planning and financial analysis provides guidance, you should understand how it is built and propose more advanced ways. It should be immediately noted that the function of business consultants does not include financial auditing and the assessment of financial indicators, only the ongoing processes are studied. For most companies, it is difficult to manage the budget in “manual mode”, since the endless morning meetings of top managers in the distribution of cash flows turn into heavy duty. To transfer this work to an automatic mode – tasks of organizational diagnostics.
5. Managerial staff – here we need to understand how the organizational structure is built in relation to the staff: whether the staff is selected for the organizational structure, or the organizational structure is formed for specific people. The latter are often observed in Ukrainian companies, where the owners act according to the principle: “well, how can one not delight the native little man,” which entails the lack of necessary competencies among employees in managerial positions. Therefore, it is necessary to figure out what prevails in this organization: customized “by itself” staff or, nevertheless, the selection was made for the organizational structure. Such a process partially resembles a personnel audit, that is, the identification of employees who, in their competencies, do not correspond to organizational processes. As a rule, there are two ways out of this situation: to train employees with missing knowledge or to replace them. Here again, the owner himself decides that for him “godfathers” or an organization is more important, where the competence of staff must meet the goals and objectives of the company.
The listed components are technical, so they can be simply well developed, like all running gears of a car. But in the process of driving a big role is played by the driver – the one who drives the car and his vision of the road along which the movement will take place. Therefore, a more responsible part of the work of consultants will be devoted to identifying the strategic objectives of the company and regular management, which ensure their implementation.
6. Strategy – first of all, it is necessary to determine where the company is going and where it wants to be, only after that to optimize the processes and decide whether the organizational and functional structure corresponds to the chosen strategy.
