Whether or not you intend it, the way your firm is portrayed on your organizational chart reveals two important things: not only the hierarchy—who reports to whom within your company—but also how you orient your firm toward your clients and your work.

Think of the way your firm is organized as a management tool, the infrastructure that will support your firm's future growth. While there are many ways to organize a design firm, any organizational structure should:

• Respond to the marketplace and meet the needs of your clients
• Allow your firm to operate effectively and efficiently
• Promote talent within the firm, and provide opportunities and paths for career development

With these three critical elements in mind, you can examine your firm from both the inside out—from your managers' and employees' perspectives; as well as from the outside in—from the perspectives of the marketplace and clients that you serve—and develop and refine a structure that anticipates and responds to the needs of both.

Designing Your Organization

Many design firms find that their organization has "evolved" organically over time, reflecting how relationships in the firm and with clients have developed rather than as a result of thoughtful organizational design. Whether your firm has come to be organized the way it is by default or by design, it's worthwhile to consider the variety of approaches to organize a design firm in the context of the future vision for your firm.

• Clients. Client-centered firms are organized from the outside in. To design a client-oriented firm, ask yourself how your clients would prefer to see your firm organized—or better yet, ask them directly. Consider the attributes that bind your clients together as a coherent group or groups, and take into account all of the relevant variables that affect your clients such as their needs, priorities, personalities, marketplace conditions, economics, geography, politics, labor pool, the cost of doing business, and, most importantly, how they define their own success.
• Project types. Because of the high stakes involved in the construction of a client's project—a home, hospital, or highway—clients prefer to hire design firms that are experts in the kinds of projects that the clients pursue. Therefore, some firms organize themselves around different project types.
• Geography. If it is important to the firm's clients that services are delivered by a firm with local presence and knowledge, then firms can open offices where their clients are or where the clients' projects are located. This is a common structure for civil engineering and surveying firms that serve land development clients.
• Principals. In many firms, a small group of principals who have worked together for a long time lead the firm by managing their own clientele whom they have developed over the years. This relationship-driven organizational structure may have overlaps in the types of clients served by each of the firm's principals, but the common denominator is that each group of clients is part of each principal's personal and professional network. To the individual client, the principal with whom they work is the firm.
• Studios. Similar to the principal orientation, some architects gravitate toward organizing their firms around studios, each led by a principal. The studio organization generally means that the full resources to complete a certain type of project, such as a school, are found within a single studio that focuses on that work.
• Services. Multidisciplinary firms can organize around the services they provide, with discipline-driven departments, such as an architectural design group, an architectural production group, an electrical engineering group, a site/civil engineering group, and a construction administration group. Each discipline comprises a department that contributes to the firm's projects and is led by a director.
• Matrix. When a design firm is large or complex, with multiple markets and locations, it has to reconcile how to manage a variety of project types, client types, and office locations. Firms like this sometimes adopt a matrix structure of organization with two reporting directions, and the firm's organizational chart looks more like a table (a matrix) than the traditional, pyramid-shaped arrangement of boxes and lines. The rows, or "vectors," of the matrix might represent project types or client types, and the columns might represent the physical locations of the firm's offices, or vice-versa. In a matrix organization, it is important to identify the dominant "vector" of the organization to define clear reporting structures.

Start With a Clean Slate

No matter how you choose to organize your firm—in one of the orientations described above, in a combination of any of these, or in some other configuration that makes sense for you and your clients—it's best to recognize that changing an organizational structure is a major adjustment for employees and clients alike.
 

If you determine that a reorganization is necessary for your firm, set aside personalities and internal politics, and resist the temptation to put names in boxes. On a clean piece of paper, design your organization conceptually the way it would work best considering the internal infrastructure that you need to meet the demands of your internal and external stakeholders in what you do. Only then should you assess who are the best players for each position and where you may have to bring people up from within or in from outside the firm to make the new organization sing.

SH Architecture Honored