Case 01 · Operations & organisation design

Who can do what? Mapping 3,000 people across 20 business units.

Role
Programme lead
Organisation
A global services group
Initiative
Group-wide capability mapping
Year
Recent

The map, in three shots

3,000 people. No single view of who can do what.

20 business units, one shared map.

Ask for a capability. See who has it, across the group.

Illustrative. Cluster sizes and highlighted share are not real data.

The problem

A group built through acquisitions had no single view of who can do what. Answering a bid’s “can we staff this?” meant emails across business units, and leadership couldn’t see skills across the group.

What I did

  1. a Drove group-wide capability mapping as part of the transformation team.
  2. b Deployed a capability matrix across 20 business units and 3,000 employees.
  3. c One shared capability taxonomy across business units, so a skill meant the same thing everywhere.
  4. d Built around three questions: can we staff this bid, who can join this project, and where do our skills sit across the group.

What changed

20

business units on one capability map

3,000

employees covered

3

decisions it now supports: bids and pitches, cross-unit staffing, leadership visibility

Outside games

Any company that grew through acquisitions, or wants to redesign how work gets done, with or without AI, needs this map first. You can’t improve, staff or automate work you can’t see.

The judgment call

“Build the map around the decisions it has to support, not around a perfect taxonomy.”

Next case · 02 Scaling delivery capacity