The Client

Delivering Sustainable Change

This Big Four accounting firm has built its success by understanding future impact and helping clients develop sustainable and long-lasting strategies. With a worldwide presence, the firm drives transformative change across various industries and sectors, setting the standard for how companies can capture future value today.

The Situation

Leading By Example

When attention to people and technology management is not prioritized during an M&A transaction, what you get is a company with a patchwork of solutions and processes that results in inefficiencies and redundancies. The impact of an inefficient organizational structure can impact a company’s performance and bottom line.

This was the situation the firm’s SaaS client faced. After years of growing its organization via prior M&A deals, the SaaS client realized that their current IT infrastructure was lacking — resembling a mix match of different solutions that could be centralized in one place.

Deciding to take a page out of their own book, the choice to migrate their current IT infrastructure to their proprietary cloud-based IT platform was made.

But they had a problem. The SaaS company needed to create its own cloud migration team to support the transition. One where new roles, governance, and accounts for ownership needed to be created. This was when they decided to engage the Big Four accounting firm.

The consulting team knew they needed the support of a qualified human capital expert that could help:

• Define the role and structure of the new organization

• Build out the ideal profile for those roles

• Provide benchmark data

• Develop service line agreements

• Establish ownership over different aspects of the organization

• Create the governance structure

The Solution

Re-Hiring Top Human Capital Talent

The M&A and Human Capital advisory practice at the Big Four accounting firm had built a bench of independent experts on Graphite that they could consistently add to their teams on-demand. Since the expert was already on their bench, they onboarded them for this particular project.

As a human capital expert with over 10 years of Big Four experience working in the space with large consulting firms like PWC, Deloitte, and more, bringing this specific expert on for this project seemed like a no-brainer.

So the point of contact at the firm reached out to their Graphite account executive (AE) to deploy the independent human capital expert on demand for this new initiative. Since the expert had worked with the company before and was already familiar with their processes, they were able to hit the ground running on day one of the project.

Results

Developing a World-Class Cloud Migration Organization

As the Organization Design Lead on the project, the expert’s responsibility was to translate the client’s operating model into an implementable team structure. Because this was a new internal team, special attention was given to the type of roles that needed to be defined.

The independent expert worked closely with the firm’s Senior Manager and the end client’s stakeholders to design a visual representation for how the team would be structured and run. They also worked together to assign who will own which part of the new organization, answering questions like:

• How should the organization be designed?

• What roles will be needed? What do they look like?

• Do you have the right resources and the right capabilities?

• Where does engineering stop, and where does product management delivery take over?

• Who’s responsible for internal customer engagement?

• Do we have the right resources and capabilities?

• Who will be responsible for design and innovation?

Once that information was captured, the process for building the structure could begin. The expert developed the roles and generated profiles for the people they should bring into those roles. They also provided service line agreements on how performance could be measured, a governance program to define ownership, and benchmark data to ensure its success.

Since completing this project, the Big Four accounting firm has continued to engage the independent human capital expert on-demand for similar initiatives within its human capital practice.