Restructuring Shouldn’t Take Three Weeks: What a 15,000-Person Transport Agency Changed

• Restructuring is now a constant, not a project. Teams need tooling built for a steady pipeline, not one-off efforts.
• Data preparation, not design, was eating the team’s time. Five experts spent their capacity on exports, clean-up and chart formatting.
• A live SuccessFactors connection removes the reconciliation. Current data, side-by-side scenarios and automatic write-back replace manual re-keying.
• Restructure cycle: from two to three weeks down to three days. Consultation packs are now produced on demand from a single source of truth.
• HR-led implementation, minimal IT involvement. IT was only needed for review and approval.

This story comes from Navigo, our partner in Australia. Navigo’s customer, a state transport agency, runs its org design on org.manager connected to SAP SuccessFactors. We’re sharing it because the problem is one we see across the market.

For large organizations, org design has stopped being an occasional project. Cost-saving programs, process improvements and shifting operating models now keep a steady pipeline of restructures moving through HR, and each one needs accurate data, credible scenarios and a clean consultation pack.

Most org design teams were not built for that pace. One of Navigo’s customers, a state transport agency with 15,000 employees, learned this the hard way.

A five-person specialist team carried the entire restructure workload for the agency. Their tools were Excel and Visio, and every restructure began with the same sequence:

• Pull the data. A report was extracted manually from SAP SuccessFactors through the Admin Centre in Employee Central.
• Clean it up. Find-and-replace passes stripped the data, and a custom formula worked out who was acting versus who substantively owned a role, alongside manual changes to several other fields.
• Build the chart. The spreadsheet was imported into Visio, producing dozens of unlinked pages that had to be dragged together and restyled by hand.
• Mark up the changes. Every change was colour-coded manually, page by page. There was no way to apply formatting across the whole chart.
• Deliver the pack. By the time it reached consultation, the data was already out of date.

The consequences went beyond a slow turnaround.
In the words of the agency’s Head of Remuneration and Organisation Design: “A team of just five was carrying the entire restructure workload for a 15,000-person organisation, split across two disconnected tools, with all the reconciliation risk that creates.”

Their expertise went into data handling instead of the job they were hired to do: designing and delivering optimized, sustainable structures. Slow delivery was the visible symptom. The deeper cost was what the team could not do while they were busy reconciling spreadsheets.

Excel and Visio are excellent general-purpose tools. Neither was designed to be the system of record for a live, 15,000-person organization. Excel holds the data but cannot show structure. Visio shows structure but has no connection to the data behind it. The team became the connection between the two, and every handoff carried the risk of an error, a stale number or a missed change.

This pattern is common. When the tools don’t talk to each other, skilled people fill the gap. It works until the volume of restructures grows, and then it stops working.

The agency needed a solution that could handle genuinely complex workforce data and close the loop back into SuccessFactors. Copying approved changes into the HR system by hand was as much a part of the problem as building the chart.

With Navigo, the agency implemented org.manager, and four things changed:

1. The data is always current. Org charts are natively integrated with SuccessFactors through an API. There are no exports to clean and no formulas to untangle, so the team starts every project from accurate, current-state data.
2. Scenarios run without touching live data. The team models a future structure, compares scenarios side by side on FTE, cost, span of control and diversity, and nothing is written back until it is approved. Leaders can weigh options with real numbers rather than screenshots.
3. Approved changes flow back automatically. Once a structure was finalized, two of the five team members previously had to edit every affected object in SuccessFactors, positions one by one. Now org.manager’s write-back does that.
4. Data keeps itself aligned. A business rule watches for changes to the data and propagates them according to the organization’s existing SuccessFactors rules, so cost centres and reporting fields stay correct without manual handling.

The team also stopped building consultation packs by hand. Proposed structures now export straight to PowerPoint, PDF or Excel, with change highlighting applied automatically.

Implementation ran module by module: modelling, write-back, the business rule trigger and a current-state chart. Each was tested against the team’s live restructure work. The project was primarily run by Navigo and the agency’s HR team, and the IT team was involved only for review and approval. That matters for organizations where IT capacity is the reason an HR technology project never starts.

The results:

• A restructure cycle that took two to three weeks now runs in three days. All heavy data preparation has been removed.
• Consultation packs are produced on demand from a single source of truth, instead of being hand-built across Excel and Visio.
• Write-back and business rules run end to end. A department change flows back into SuccessFactors and down to positions automatically.
• A small specialist team is back on design. It spends its time on structure and strategy rather than spreadsheet and chart admin.

Speed is the headline, but the more useful takeaway is what the speed exposes.

Three questions are worth asking your own team:

1. How much of a restructure is design, and how much is data preparation? If preparation dominates, the tools are limiting your team’s impact, not the team.
2. How old is your data by the time a decision-maker sees it? A pack that is out of date at consultation weakens the whole proposal.
3. Who re-keys approved changes into your HR system, and what happens when they make a mistake? Manual write-back is a quiet risk in every restructure.

If restructuring is a constant in your organization, your tooling has to be built for a constant. Otherwise your most skilled people end up as the integration layer between systems.