Organization Design

Model structural changes to your organization and see the impact on your costs and overall health.

Overview

Organization Design is a dynamic canvas where you can model and analyze structural changes to your organization. The changes you model are based on your real data points, which integrates your current hierarchies and positions so you can see the immediate structural and financial impacts of design changes. With key metric summaries built directly into your workflow, you can gain insights quickly and ensure every structural decision aligns with your broader strategic goals.

Some common use cases include:

• Restructuring for growth: Create new organizations and reallocate talent to fill new positions.
• Leadership changes: Optimize changes in leadership by modeling strategic structural changes that improve management efficiency, streamline reporting lines, and eliminate organizational bottlenecks.
• Planning workforce reductions: Identify redundant positions and move them into a holding area to calculate the cost savings.
• Improving organization efficiency: Identify opportunities to improve spans and layers within the organization.

Beyond data visibility, you gain perspective on your organization's structural integrity and health as you work. Integrated design principles automatically flag structural issues—such as pay level misalignment or managers with too many or too few direct reports—while real-time metrics show how your changes affect your budgeted total costs.

Organization Design works with Visier's security model to ensure you only see data you are permitted to see. Your data security context is applied when you are working with projects and scenarios. Position data is persisted within a design, so you will always see the positions you modeled even if your access level changes later. In contrast, employee data will update to be shown or hidden based on your current permissions. For a list of data requirements, see Organization Design Data Requirements.

Create a project

A project is a container for one or more scenarios. A scenario is a single version of an organization design within that project. When you create a project:

• A snapshot of the latest data is stored as the baseline, which serves as the starting point for all scenarios created in the project. For more information about scenarios, see Create and Compare Scenarios.
• A default scenario is automatically created for you.

To create a project:

1. On the navigation bar, click Organization Design > New project.
2. Type a name for the project.
3. Optional: If your administrator has set a default filter context for your organization, you can toggle the filters to refine your position scope in your project. Some toggles may be off by default depending on your loaded data.
4. Optional: Select one or multiple starting points. By default, you are designing for the entire organization. Selecting a starting point focuses your design on a specific branch of the organization. Selecting multiple starting points lets you view specific teams side by side.
5. Click Create.

Explore a project

The following screenshot shows the default scenario in a newly created project.

1. Baseline: The baseline data is a snapshot of your data at the time you created the project, you can update the baseline when there is newer data available.
2. Scenario: The scenario you are viewing. You can update details of the scenario such as name and description, or click the dropdown arrow to create and edit scenarios.
3. Organizations view: A view for high-level designing. Add, move, or edit entire organizations. For more information, see Design by Organization.
4. Positions view: A view for granular designing. Manage individual positions and edit specific position details. For more information, see Design by Position.
5. Changes view: A final table of changes made that you can export to CSV or XLSX.
6. Undo/Redo:
   • Undo: Reverses your last change.
   • Redo: Restores your last change.
7. Manage scenario access: Share your scenario with collaborators and control what they can see, including sensitive position data.
8. Show comments: View, add, and filter comments on the scenario or selected node.
9. Settings:
   • Project details: Review your project's configuration details.
   • Metrics: Select which key metrics, such as budgeted cost or span of control, are included in the metric summary.
   • Nodes: Customize the appearance of nodes to display the information most relevant to your goals.
10. More actions:
    • Compare scenarios: Compare your default scenario against your selected comparison data to determine the best solution for your project.
    • Export to PowerPoint: Share your organization's structure and metrics with stakeholders as a PowerPoint presentation.
11. Search bar: Use this to quickly find and jump to specific employees or positions (in Positions view) or organizations (in Organizations view) within the canvas.
12. Metric summary: Overall key metric values that automatically adjust as you make changes. Hover over a key metric to compare Scenario, Baseline, and Difference values, or view a detailed metric breakdown. Scenario and Baseline compare the current values based on your modeled changes against the original values from when you first created the project, while Difference shows the difference between the two.
13. Node: Represents a position (in Positions view) or an organization (in Organizations view). Click a node to view and edit its details.
14. Expand: Located on a node, click this to show nested direct reports or organizations. The numbers represent the direct reports out of total reports (in Positions view), and the number of sub-organizations (in Organizations view).
15. Show details: Also accessible by clicking a node in the canvas. Use this panel to view key metrics, view and edit position or organization details, and manage assignments.
16. Show holding area: A staging area for unassigned employees and positions. Use this area to track potential exits or internal moves before finalizing changes. You can drag employees and positions back into the canvas to re-add them to your scenario.
17. Show design principles: A panel in Positions view where you can see organizational guardrails set by your administrator that you should adhere to when designing your scenario.
18. Hide employees: A toggle in Positions view that removes employee names from the canvas. This allows for unbiased structural planning by focusing on positions rather than individuals.
19. Zoom: Zoom in or out, or reset the view back to default.