Case study: Transportation
Eagle Hill’s organizational design tool streamlines transit clients’ restructuring
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Designing a new organizational structure to accommodate rapid growth
Like many transportation providers, a regional public transit agency faced increased construction costs, limited resources and delays to service extension and new station construction. Those pressures revealed that its organizational structure limited visibility into decision making and project statuses, as well as created silos and duplication of effort across departments. To address these challenges, the agency launched an organizational restructuring initiative and partnered with Eagle Hill for a span of control analysis to move them towards a leaner and more operationally-efficient organization.
Our data-driven span of control analysis was powered by our Organizational Structure Analyzer. The tool brought together key organizational data to highlight supervisory workloads, structural inconsistencies, and the complexity of different roles, allowing leaders to explore alternative design scenarios and understand the trade-offs across spans and layers without getting bogged down in raw data. Its automatic generation of org charts gave senior leaders a clear, bird’s-eye view of the proposed structure, helping them see the implications of design decisions with confidence.
Goal
Enable the client’s decision making by rapidly delivering a scalable, data-driven organizational assessment and generating customizable, future-state span of control scenarios.
Unconventional consulting—and breakthrough results
employees from the executive suite to the frontline impacted
departments involved in the employee mapping process
centralized employee dataset updated and mapped to the new organizational structure
The challenge: Navigating complexity under a tight timeline
The future-state design process was moving slowly, and stakeholders lacked a clear, shared view of the current state. Employees were moving between departments, making it hard to understand the effects of de-siloing. This created risks of duplicate roles, hidden layers, and inconsistent titles or grades, complicating workforce transitions and slowing decisions. At the same time, they faced a large volume of information to synthesize and significant pressure to finalize the future-state organizational structure quickly.
The span of control analyses served as a guardrail, helping confirm that supervisory burdens remain reasonable and that no new layers or duplications are introduced.
The roadmap to success: Creating a single source of truth
Rather than buying a costly enterprise system, the agency used Eagle Hill’s Org Structure Analyzer as a fit-for-purpose platform. It centralized input, automated analysis, and accelerated decision making. The tool generated detailed future state charts and streamlined the design process.
Our team tailored the tool to the agency’s structure and benchmarks, so it supported context-specific decision making. We used anonymized employee data to remove emotion and bias, and a cross-functional working group reviewed outputs to ensure fairness and compliance.
We then helped the agency finalize its new organizational structure for 1,500 employees in just three days during an intensive mapping meeting, followed by leadership approval of the future state. We delivered final org charts and a centralized master dataset for HR to use in workforce transition planning.
The path forward: Driving organizational restructuring through data
The span of control analyses played a critical role in driving the organizational restructuring and supporting client’s effectiveness. As a result of our collaboration, the agency’s centralized employee dataset has been updated and mapped to the new organizational structure. This single source of truth ensures all stakeholders have a clear, consistent understanding of the organizational design moving forward.
To ensure the organizational structure is sustainable, we equipped HR with the tools to own the dataset, established a regular refresh cadence, and defined governance rules so the future state stays current. The agency is also sharing the organizational chart visualizations with employees as part of a comprehensive change management and communications program that the Eagle Hill team continues to help design and implement.
The Eagle Hill Organizational Analysis Design Tool
Immediate analysis. The tool imports HR data, detects misreported or inconsistent reporting lines, computes supervisory burden metrics, and shows dashboards for average span, layer counts, and hot spots such as many one-to-one managers. Leaders use these outputs to test scenarios and quantify the people and cost impact of each option.
Easy visualization. The tool generates current and future-state org charts and allows side by side comparison of scenario options. Visualizations use anonymized role and function mappings so decisions focus on roles and accountabilities instead of named individuals.
Workforce planning insights. The tool integrates O*NET to enrich role profiles with occupation complexity, typical skills, and labor market signals. That helps distinguish roles that scale with wider spans from roles that need narrower spans because of complexity or interdependence.
Customizable and scalable. Configurable supervisory burden criteria, custom benchmark sets, and role grouping rules let the tool reflect organization specific nuances rather than one-size-fits-all guidance.
