"Designing and shaping the Matrix Organisation may mean more work".

Without any shadow of a doubt it will require more work, late nights, early morning but the results are worth it. You can turn around a sleepy, silo driven organisation and turn it into a sleek, fast moving, energised customer focused business if you have the focus, the plan, the will and the leadership.

CEO's will be told time and again that Matrix organisation is too difficult or too complex to set up. Yet some of the leading businesses in the world model themselves on the Matrix Model.

Moving from 5 or 6 levels of management to 3 may sound difficult, until you realise that speed in delivering to the customer is enhanced through knocking down barriers, designing processes from the customer perspective (rather than the organisation's) and winning new business.

The CEO has to remind her or himself that there are many careers, egos, and ambitions residing in the traditional silo driven organisation. In the new Matrix organisation achievement and success is dispensed by how well staff and managers in the organisation work organically across the business to speed up customer delight and delivery.

Only when the walls come tumbling down and new processes are put in place do you realise that much of the old culture was focused on doing business (with itself) between business units rather than adding value for the customer.

The Benefits of Matrix Organisation to the CEO are:

• Process and Customer delivery are at the forefront of everyone's mind
• Serving the customer is of paramount import
• Every business unit in the process has a clear rationale
• Managers have set responsibilities both up and down and across the organisation
• Budgets are geared to processes rather than hidden in functional enclaves
• It is easy identify who and what adds value
• Change and continuous improvement becomes the norm
• Behaviours that take us towards delighting the customer are identified and practised
• Open management should evolve with functional political infighting becoming a thing of the past
• A new transparency in how resources are used can be viewed from a variety of perspectives
• New measures mean that resources are better utilised
• Customers notice the change and hopefully become life-time advocates
• Profitability should rise with fewer staff in managerial positions
• Team working taking over and cross skilled working becomes the norm as can be seen