At early stage any organization start its life in a chaotic growing mode, nothing is bad about that even if nowadays some management mantra tend to consider control and planning a key of success.
The chaotic age has indeed a reason to be, only that model allows fast adaptation to external input and pressure, this also allow faster tuning of organization goals and structure.
The above are the main reasons why new business is usually more easy to intercept with de-structured small and fast moving organizations compared to large ones, of course large organization can count on more resources both in term of budget and of know-how.
Budget, skills, resources of large organization takes time to express their power and on the timeline flexible ones have a window to compete and establish business.
Despite flexibility and speed at some point pressure to streamline processes and procedure will start emerging.
Growing of organization, headcount increase and asymmetric people know-how star create overheads and consume resources slowing the results.
The natural reaction to that secularizations of your org will be pushing for structured processes, this is of course the right things to do but the question is when to start that process and where to start that.
The key aspect to consider is that processes do not only give benefits but also come together with forecast-able overheads as well as hidden unexpected costs.
It is a key success factor to balance costs vs benefits without being dazzled by benefits and feeling of improved control, every organization has a best switching region; the size and configuration where the benefit of processes will overrule the cost and the effectiveness gap generated.
Where is the switching region? This depend over multiple factor, a key driver is the market segment organization does operate, but other factor like culture (country culture or multinational culture) play a key role in identifying switch region, ultimately the human resources is the key to drive that process.
Support from a experience organization consultant and a proper assessment matrix will help to demystify the benefit of process organisation and to plan as a project supported by ROI calculation the steps required with rational approach.
