“We had to discover the optimal new design,” Harold adds. “By sharpening our strategy, making our management agile, becoming aware of our behavior and improving employees' knowledge of customer-oriented thinking (CX), we learn a lot about what works best.”

“At the same time, in 2021 we started an in-depth analysis and design of the future Pension Management processes - in the context of a new system solution. A little later we did a similar redesign of the process and organizational design of Balance Sheet Management. We call these the Target Operating Models of the two organizational units, or TOMs.”

“With all this information and experiences,” Harold continues, “at the end of 2021 we were able to start thinking about a future organizational design for the entire PGB Pension Services. We were looking for a kind of blueprint in which we had an overview of all the important business functions and their collaboration for the entire organization. Adriaan calls this the muscles of the organization.”

Adriaan laughing: “Exactly. Just as a marathon runner develops different muscles than a 100m sprinter, organizations that adapt their goals will have to take a critical look at the core processes and skills required to be successful. On the one hand, this means investing in new business functions, but also phasing out or saying goodbye to parts that have become redundant. To discover this, we started designing with the management and a number of key figures.”

“With the 'blueprint for a customer-oriented organization', we have a strategic elaboration of the most important processes and business functions for the future. However, it is not an 'Ikea ​​construction drawing' that indicates exactly which screw goes where,” says Adriaan. “Each department and every employee can decide how they contribute to the whole, but how this is completed and organized in a customer-oriented manner is up to them.”

At the beginning of 2022, a guiding coalition was formed, beautifully baptized by Martijn 'the KIWIs', to deepen the blueprint. KIWI stands for Customer-oriented, Innovative, Agile and In-connected. This group consisted of managers of existing departments or quartermasters of departments yet to be established. The assignment for both was to further develop or refine their specific processes and teams in their Target Operating Models so that the strategy of the customer-oriented organization and the blueprint could be put into practice.

Harold: “We consciously opted for this decentralized approach. We wanted to get managers and employees to think about their future design as quickly as possible. That gave ownership. The disadvantage was that this was difficult to coordinate.” Adriaan: “Each team interprets a strategy or policy choice slightly differently, uses different timelines and faces its own specific obstacles. In order to remain connected, the KIWIs met monthly to agree on their effects and choices. This also revealed the dependencies between departments in a chain. During a specially designed 'contracting day' we further visualized these dependencies. People from different departments engaged in 'speed dating' in short consultations to discover improvements and 'contract' with each other on the actions that need to be carried out.