CASE STUDY

Aligning structure to strategy

Client: Colonial Pipeline

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leaders consulted

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leadership roles assessed

At a glance

Challenge

Colonial Pipeline needed to redesign the organization so the company has the right structure, right roles, and right people to execute the strategy.

Result

Pariveda worked with the Executive Team and 40+ senior leaders across the organization to redesign teams and define role accountabilities to increase strategic alignment.

Impact

The new organizational structure and associated talent changes positioned the company to grow the business and improve operational reliability. Several functions implemented extensive structural changes to improve service quality and operational efficiency.

Colonial Pipeline operates the largest pipeline for refined oil products in the U.S. The pipeline system delivers over 100 million gallons of fuel per day from Houston to New York.

Colonial provides gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and heating oil for more than 50 million Americans on a system that includes 5,500 miles of pipeline, tank farms and terminals across 14 states.

The organization structure was not optimally designed to achieve the strategic outcomes.

When Colonial’s CEO joined the organization, she established a new strategy to drive business growth and operational resilience. After formulating and communicating the strategy to employees, the CEO recognized a need to assess the structure of several functions in the organization to ensure delivery of the strategy. A key component of the strategy was to modernize the technology stack and create predictive analytics for the Operations function to improve operational reliability. There was also a need to optimize the structure and roles of multiple functions to align the structure to the strategy. Another issue to address was inconsistency in how titles were assigned to roles, so the organization needed a methodology to “level roles” in a consistent manner.

The CEO sought out potential partners who could help senior leaders to assess the organizational structure. The CEO selected Pariveda for the organizational design engagement based on Pariveda’s “engineering approach” to organizational design. This “engineering approach” is based on clearly articulated concepts and principles of organization design to guide the work. The CEO recognized that a rational, systematic approach to organization design would increase the likelihood of aligning the organization with the “right structure, right roles and right people”.

Pariveda worked with the Executive Team and 40+ senior leaders across the organization and the HR team to achieve the intended outcomes.

Key activities for the engagement included:

Advising the CEO on Enterprise organization design options
Facilitating and advising on organization design with Executives for individual functions: Compliance, Finance, Operations Maintenance, Operations Services, Optimization & Innovation, Technical Services, Technology
Training Colonial staff on the Role Accountabilities methodology
Co-designing a Leveling Framework to assign titles to roles in a consistent way
Training the HR team on talent assessment and role leveling frameworks
Leveling People Leader roles to consistently determine titles for roles based on role accountabilities

All these activities were informed by a common set of principles for effective organization design. These common principles provided a methodical approach to organization design work that leveraged the client’s knowledge of their business, people and culture to create contextualized solutions.

The redesigned organizational structure and associated talent changes positioned the company to grow the business and improve operational reliability.

Several functions implemented extensive structural changes to improve service quality and operational efficiency. Leaders also reported that employees had greater role clarity after completing the Role Accountabilities exercise.