Supporting a major transformation through organization design and workforce planning
A multinational entertainment organization was transitioning from a globally centralized operating model to one centered around stronger regional businesses, supported by shared platforms and capabilities.
As part of this shift, one of the organization’s largest global business units – employing approximately 2,500 people – needed to be fundamentally redesigned. The program aimed to improve regional alignment, simplify the organization structure and reduce operational duplication, while maintaining continuity across a complex international footprint.
Delivering this transformation required significant organizational redesign across multiple functions and geographies. Existing global teams needed to be reshaped or transitioned into regional structures, new capabilities established, and employees moved across entities and jurisdictions. At the same time, leadership teams needed confidence that structural decisions remained aligned to financial targets, operating model principles and implementation requirements.
Berkeley was engaged to support the end-to-end people transformation, bringing together organization design, workforce planning and implementation preparation into a single coordinated program.
Bringing structure, governance and financial alignment to organization design
When Berkeley joined the program, organization design activity was already underway across several functions. However, approaches differed across teams, with limited visibility of cross-functional dependencies and aggregate organizational impact.
Berkeley introduced a structured organization design framework to bring greater consistency, governance and transparency to the program. This included establishing clear design principles aligned to the target operating model, cost objectives and location strategy, alongside a coordinated governance approach across functions.
Working closely with Finance and HR teams, Berkeley helped ensure structural decisions remained aligned to workforce costs, role design, grading and downstream implementation requirements throughout the program.
To support this approach, Berkeley used organization design and workforce planning tooling to create a consolidated view of workforce, structural and financial data. This enabled leadership teams to assess design options, model scenarios and understand trade-offs in real time as structures evolved.
Creating a single view of the organization
A key early priority was establishing a reliable baseline view of the current organization.
Berkeley consolidated workforce and financial data into a single workforce planning platform to create a validated picture of organizational structure, reporting lines and cost. This became the foundation for future-state design activity and allowed changes to be assessed consistently against agreed principles and financial targets.
With this foundation in place, Berkeley worked collaboratively with functional leaders to redesign teams, reshape reporting structures and establish new capabilities where required. Structural decisions were assessed within a controlled modeling environment, enabling immediate visibility of impacts on headcount, spans and layers, cost and organizational complexity as changes were made.
This allowed organization design, financial alignment and implementation planning to progress together rather than as separate activities.
Berkeley brought structure and clarity to our complex transformation journey, particularly in managing our Operating Model and Organizational Design work. Their expertise and methodology proved invaluable in navigating our multi-layered, global transformation, effectively bringing together diverse stakeholders across the organization and accelerating critical decisions. The team demonstrated exceptional senior stakeholder management capabilities and quickly established themselves as highly regarded partners within our business, always adapting to our culture. Through their use of Orgvue, we gained unprecedented visibility into our organizational structure and dependencies, enabling data-driven decisions that significantly accelerated our transformation outcomes.”
Chief People Officer
Enabling more collaborative and informed decision-making
The program also changed the way organization design decisions were made.
Rather than relying on disconnected spreadsheets and static reporting, Berkeley facilitated a more collaborative and iterative design process within a shared modeling environment. This enabled stakeholders to review structural changes, test scenarios and assess impacts in real time as the design evolved.
This approach improved transparency across functions and strengthened governance by giving leadership teams clearer visibility of progress, risks and trade-offs throughout the program.
The use of structured modeling reduced rework between teams, accelerated decision-making cycles and helped ensure the final organization design remained aligned to both strategic objectives and cost targets.
Delivering a controlled and sustainable organization redesign
By combining organization design expertise with a structured, data-led approach, Berkeley helped the client coordinate complex structural changes across multiple functions and geographies while maintaining alignment to strategic, financial and operational priorities.
The result was not simply a redesigned organization, but a more controlled and sustainable way of delivering organizational change at scale.
The story in numbers
~2000
People
8
Layers of organization design
15+
Countries
5
Months from design to delivery
8
Functions
