365° Health Check Audit
The 365° health check exhaustively reviewed the company, in order to identify what was holding back growth. The answer turned out to be in a neglected part of the company.
The HR department had not grown fast enough to keep up with the needs of the organization. As a result, HR-related problems were flooding the organization, disrupting work. Technical debt accumulated in all departments, hiding the root cause. Attempts to fix the issue by hiring only made things worse. Eventually, the resulting issues ended up on the desks of the CEO/C-suite, overloading them.
Experimental Pilot
A pilot project was conducted to experimentally test a solution. The pilot: fix the indigestion by including HR in decision-making meetings about accepting new projects.
This tested the hypothesis that slowing growth until HR's indigestion was resolved would ultimately speed growth. Hypothesis confirmed. A parallel experiment was designed to test whether the Head of HR had the needed competencies. Answer turned out to be yes.
Project Management
The successful pilot was rolled out into a permanent solution. In order to ensure success, the second most powerful person, after the CEO, was made responsible.
In addition to his responsibilities, the second-in-command took on the position of Co-Head of HR at 25% of his time. He accepted this task because success would make him almost certainly the next CEO. His mandate was to make sure that the organization's growth was limited by the ability of the HR department to handle it, and that resources were funneled into strengthening the HR function. A project management office (PMO) was formed to keep the project on-track.