The Client

Helping Businesses Reach New Heights

This innovative global SaaS company develops cloud-based IT software solutions that help businesses increase revenue, grow sustainably, and drive growth. With a worldwide presence, the company is committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with the end goal of moving the business forward.

The Situation

Fragmented Infrastructure Holds Company Back

Companies involved in M&A transactions always take note of similar solutions they each have to achieve synergies in the post-merger integration stage. But, due to various technical reasons and complexities encountered in the execution phase, some redundant solutions are not phased out. This often results in sub-optimal technology infrastructure while simultaneously impacting human capital investments.

For years, the parent company’s growth strategy was to scale its SaaS business through M&A deals. These complexities involved several post-merger integration efforts and created a fragmented IT infrastructure patched together with underperforming integrations. Instead of a centralized structure, the IT and human capital infrastructure resembled a quilt of varying software solutions.

So the company decided to take a different approach. Rather than invest in yet another tool, the strategy would be to migrate to its own proprietary cloud-based IT platform. But there was one glaring problem: a new department would have to be created to support the migration.

New roles, a governance structure, and ownership levels would need to be defined to create the company’s migration team. More importantly, it would require the help of a qualified human capital consultant to pull it off. One that could assist in the:

• Creation and structure of the new organization and the roles that would support it

• Development of the ideal knowledge workers for those roles

• Supplement benchmark data

• Provide service line agreements

• Identify who would own what aspects of the new organization

• Define the governance structure

The Solution

Onboarding The Right Expert for The Project

Finding an independent human capital consultant that can carve out a new organization is no easy feat. Having heard of Graphite, the company reached out to an account executive (AE).

After sharing their scope of work and qualifications for the ideal independent consultant for the project, the AE set off to review all candidates on the platform that fit the description. Using their knowledge of the platform, the AE presented three curated experts to the company.

Through its conversations with the shortlisted experts, the company found an independent expert that most closely aligned with its criteria.

The company liked that the human capital consultant had over 10 years of experience in the space working at highly reputed Big Four firms such as PwC and Deloitte.

After a speedy evaluation process, the SaaS company onboarded the expert as their Organization Design Lead.

Results

Defining the Right Organizational Structure for Success

The company held a project kickoff meeting with the independent consultant to discuss the project’s scope. The main goal for the expert was to create an operating model that would align with the new team structure. Since this was a new department, it was important that job descriptions be properly defined.

To achieve that goal, the independent expert engaged key stakeholders to create a visual representation of the department’s organizational structure, such as what role reported to who and so forth.

The question of ownership was also defined in a series of interactive meetings. With the information captured, the independent human capital consultant started to build out the profiles for every role in the new organizational structure. Doing so enabled the company to start filling in these critical roles both internally and externally.

With service level agreements clearly identified as well, the documentation would empower the company to track and measure performance, set benchmarks, and define the governance structure.

Pleased with the seamless experience working and managing the independent expert on the platform, the company has continued to partner with Graphite to address capacity gaps across several teams.