Reorg Scenario Planner: Model Org Changes on a Copy, Decide with Data

The problem this kills

When leadership decides to reorganize, the planning almost always happens in a copy of "the org spreadsheet." Someone duplicates the tab, starts dragging people under new managers, deletes a few rows for the roles being cut, and tries to total up the new headcount and cost in their head. Then a second VP makes a different copy with different assumptions. Now there are four versions floating around in email, none of them agree, and nobody can tell you which one the CEO actually approved.

It gets worse. Spreadsheets quietly orphan people — you move a manager out and three reports are suddenly hanging off nobody, and you don't notice until someone asks "wait, who does Priya report to now?" Spans of control balloon to 14 on one team and shrink to 1 on another with no flag. The cost numbers drift because someone fat-fingered a salary. And the single scariest part: people fiddle with the real roster file while "just exploring," and a draft idea accidentally becomes a fact.

A reorg is one of the highest-stakes things an organization does. It deserves a real, governed tool — not a graveyard of half-finished spreadsheet copies.

What you'll build

A simple internal web app for HR and leadership. You import your current roster once — each person, their role, their manager (reporting line), and their loaded cost. That becomes the read-only baseline. Then you spin up scenarios: fully sandboxed copies where you can move teams under new managers, change reporting lines, add proposed roles, and cut roles — without ever touching the live roster or each other's scenarios.

For every scenario the tool instantly computes the things reorg decisions actually turn on: total headcount, total cost, average and maximum spans of control, the number of management layers, and a list of any orphaned reports (people whose manager was moved or cut). You see all your scenarios side by side in a comparison view, so the trade-offs are obvious. Leadership reviews the finalists, selects and approves one, and only then does the tool let you export the approved scenario as the plan of record — a clean CSV you hand to your formal change-request process. Nothing about the live org changes inside this tool. It informs the decision; it doesn't execute it.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your organization — how your roster is shaped and what the columns are actually called, how you measure cost (base, fully loaded, FTE), what counts as a "manager," your real reporting-line conventions, how big the org is, and the messy cases (dotted-line reports, shared-services teams, open reqs, contractors, people on leave). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything, so the planner matches your org structure — not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the data model, the current-org import, the sandboxed scenario engine (move, re-line, add, cut), the metrics calculator (headcount, cost, spans, layers, orphans), the side-by-side comparison, the leadership selection-and-approval gate, and the approved-plan export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that uses a Google Sheet / CSV roster as the source and produces a clean approved-plan CSV — so you can build and run the whole thing this weekend regardless of which HRIS you use.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

A reorg planner touches the most sensitive data and decisions in the company, so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your HR and leadership team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data, and a complete audit trail of who created which scenario, who changed which reporting line, and who approved the final plan. Crucially, every scenario is fully sandboxed — edits live on a copy and can never write back to the baseline roster. There's a hard human-approval gate: a scenario is a draft until leadership selects and approves it, and only an approved scenario can be exported as the plan of record. Duplicate guards (keyed on scenario plus employee) keep the same person from appearing twice inside a scenario.

Who it's for

HR leaders, people-ops partners, finance partners supporting workforce planning, and the executives running a reorganization — anyone who is currently hacking at copies of the org spreadsheet and arguing over which version is real. If you can export your current roster and describe how your reporting lines work, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll be comparing your first set of reorg scenarios on screen before the weekend's out.