“Nobody fell in love with an Operating Model”,a colleague of mine once colourfully articulated to me.

Operating Models can be hard to design and even harder to implement, but we neglect (or worst case ignore) them at our peril. A poorly implemented Operating Model can significantly reduce the benefits of large scale transformation, contribute to spiralling BAU costs and ultimately, the loss of customer business.

If we go back to first principles we’re likely to agree that for businesses to succeed and continue to succeed, they require an Operating Model that delivers the Business Model. Our following areas of concern are that the Operating Model is quick, cost effective and has the ability to flex and scale with the business. We would also do well not to forget our most important asset, our people. The Operating Model should serve as a vehicle for educating and empowering employees, giving them a real stake and interest in the work they are doing.

We can illustrate the power of an Operating Model by walking through a simple (and quite real) example. On a monthly basis, Department A is responsible for high volume and high complexity end to end data processing, analysis and reporting, serving business line stakeholders. The Operating Model for this work is driven by functional teams, working in vertical siloes.

Each month, business line stakeholders raise multiple business specific queries. In this Operating Model, each query is run past several different resource (our vertical siloes) before it makes it’s way back to the requestor. The information returned is often delayed, disjointed and in some cases, contradictory, particularly where our verticals are not collaborating or are unaware of the cascade impact of the work they are performing within the Operating Model.

Is there a simple and effective change to be made here? Yes! We can see the disconnect between the business and the Operating Model. Let’s remove the verticals and change the Operating Model to run horizontally, by business line.

What does this give us? It provides the environment in which our people have left to right ownership and knowledge of the data, per business line. As a result, they’re bought into and empowered within the process and closely aligned with the business. They’re able to respond knowledgeably and quickly to stakeholder queries. Our time to market has accelerated, we have a happier and informed workforce (suppliers and customers) and we have cut our costs. Rather than throwing extra resource at the problem, we have gone back to first principles, applied some lateral thinking and made the change required.

What we have above, is a working example of the power of the Operating Model (for the good and the not so good), regardless of the technology used. Operating Models are the pivot on which businesses and successful change rest, from start ups, to existing BAU in large enterprises, to large scale transformations using Big Data, Cloud and Intelligent Automation.

Fall in love with your Operating Model and make it work for your business.

For more help and information regarding Operating Models and the services we offer, contact us at info@verander.co.uk