Flat Organizational Structure in a Consulting Firm

I use to work for a consulting group that focuses on providing professional software developing consulting service to the client all around the world, it's an American based company, the headquarter is set to Chicago, and there are offices in 6 countries and more than 20 cities. In general, it's a medium size company that has about 1200 employee in total, for the China office, there are a bit more than 100 employees fitted into the two cities.

Due to the property of the consulting service, the organization structure of the company is fairly simple and clean, it's a more flat style, very few layers within the organization, and not too much branches you can find in the chart. Here I'd like to introduce the company structure from the top to the bottom.

The company is a private owned one, the board, therefore, contains just a couple of people, not too many. The chairman is literally the owner of the company, and there are the top-level executives being appointed by the board to steer the direction of the whole company.

Right under the board and the executives, the company was firstly being separated according to the county and area, then each of them was divided into two branches, one is named as professional service, which is basically the departments provided consulting services to our client and generate revenue, and the other one is called as NPS, stands for none-professional-service department, mainly includes all the supporting groups include but not limited to finance, HR, office administration and etc.

By the time I was working for the company, I was a senior consultant that focused on project management and business analysis, so apparently I am a member of the professional service group. That's why the rest of this article is focused on this department of the company.

The structure of the professional department is a very dynamically composed according to the projects needs. There are a few positions are dedicated to client relationship and resource management, and then, all the rest people, also known as consultants, are labeled by the expertise field, for example, database development or project management, then they will be fitted into the projects as the project needs.

Normally the organization design of a company is highly related to the culture that the company would like to build, this company is not an exception as well. Open to the suggestion, encourage communication in various channels, not too much strict writing rules is common shared culture in the hi-tech company, this company would like to adopt all these things as well, and given that at the very beginning, the company relatively small with about 300 employees all around the world, the company is fairly easy to fit into the flat organization structure.

But things changed a little bit later, the company is doing very good in the business and begin