From production company to service-oriented organisation

The company had to go through two transformations at the same time. In content: from a production-oriented approach to a service- and client-oriented way of working - with the voice of the client anchored in the business processes. In culture: from an internally focused, incoherent way of working to one team with shared leadership, disciplined end-to-end teamwork and clear responsibilities.

Specific complications came with that. The management team had limited business experience with transformation approaches. Leadership capacities in middle management had to be activated to carry the transformation organisation-wide. And the strategic choices - keep both printing and publishing, or focus on one activity - required a well-founded scenario analysis, not gut feel.

We built the transformation around two parallel tracks. The culture track: organisational structure and people, aimed at one-team building and an effective leadership team. We worked with Katzenbach & Smith's team-types typology to shape the leadership team explicitly, and organised structured sessions on purpose & direction (basics), team interaction and relations with the rest of the organisation. In parallel we defined client-centred key values, a leadership competence framework, a people due diligence (insight into the pre-press department and into middle management's leadership capacities) and a training & development plan.

The structure track: the business processes and organisational architecture. Together with the leadership team we brought strategic priorities to consensus, translated them into operational result areas and performance metrics per critical business process, identified the key processes and assigned process managers. Then we redesigned the organisational structure, organised organisation-wide communication sessions, and set up BPM seminars on Lean Thinking, process mapping, process improvement and service blueprint design. In parallel, middle management followed training in situational leadership (Hersey & Blanchard). Finally, we built a process-oriented HR system that anchored the new way of working structurally.

The methodology stayed deliberately pragmatic and concrete. We worked outside-in: client requirements as the starting point, not cost reduction as an opening. Top-down and bottom-up in parallel - consensus at the top, ownership at the bottom. We generated targeted quick wins to create credibility and momentum for the heavier structural decisions later in the trajectory.

The turning point came when the leadership team started seeing itself as one team for the first time, and no longer as the sum of individual department heads. From that shared identity, strategic choices could be made with conviction, and middle management got the space to take responsibility for execution.

At the same time, the way of talking about the company shifted. No longer about volumes and machines, but about clients, audiences and service delivery. The company positioned itself strategically as a media house: printing and publishing in coherence, with client value as anchor point for future investment.

Transforming a production company into a service-oriented organisation is not a technical restructuring but an integral learning process. It only works when leadership, structure and culture are redrawn simultaneously and in alignment. First the board and CEO in consensus, then the leadership team as one whole, then organisation-wide.

The organisation evolved from an internally focused, incoherent way of working to a media organisation with a recognisable media house profile, an effective leadership team, redesigned core processes with process managers, a client-centred values framework, a leadership competence framework, integrated HR policy and an organisation-wide mindset around process-oriented thinking. Improvement capacity from then on came from the employees themselves, rather than from external interventions.