A New Way to Design Transformation

Have you ever been part of planning a new, audacious transformation in your organization? Standing up a new organization, defining a new way of operating between teams, or implementing technology that will have widespread impact on your organization? Most transformation programs tend to start the same way: a small group drafts a vision statement, creates a new org chart, puts together a RACI document, and holds an exciting kick-off. This approach may look good on paper, but in our experience, organizations that set up their transformations in such a way all achieve one common result: more meetings! That’s it! They don’t actually change. Stakeholders, who aren’t necessarily inspired to action by the vision statement, get tired of the never-ending cadence of ineffective meetings and eventually quit attending. The transformation effort limps on for a while, then eventually gets dubbed a failure and dies.  

1. Identify a Clear Internal Customer: Align on a specific internal customer to ensure the operating model remains laser-focused and responsive to the customer’s needs.
2. Understand the Customer's Needs: Empathize with the internal customer, identifying their goals, challenges, and desired benefits.
3. Define the Value the Operating Model Will Provide: Craft a clear value proposition that serves as a north star for the operating model’s actions and services.
4. Decide the Services the Operating Model Will Provide: Identify and prioritize the capabilities the operating model will need to stand up or improve on to deliver the value proposition to the customer.
5. Identify Resources, Partners, and Funding: Pinpoint the necessary resources, including people, tools, space, partners, and funding to support the operating model services.
6. Establish Foundational Behaviors: Define the cultural norms and collaborative behaviors that will guide the operating model teams in working together.
7. Set Clear Success Metrics: Develop key operational, behavioral, and financial performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the operating model’s success in providing value..
8. Define Org Structure: Determine the optimal organizational structure for the operating model, deciding where people will be situated and how they will interact with the internal customer.
9. Build a Transformation Action Plan: Develop a 100-day human-centered change plan to ensure the operating model becomes a new way of working, rather than a mere strategy on a page. 

We’ve designed over 50 new operating models, transformation offices, centers of excellence, and innovation centers using this approach. We consistently see a similar outcome: a sustained effort to focus on the internal customer’s needs, resulting in tangible change and transformation. Teams become aligned around who they are serving, their day-to-day work drives value, and resources are used in relevant ways that minimizes waste.  Real work gets done, organizational objectives get achieved, and people start to feel real meaning in their work. 

In real life: We recently ran a workshop with 17 business and IT leaders from a large telecommunications company to redesign their way of operating. They were unable to collaboratively deliver technology at the speed needed by their customers and had resorted to blaming each other when things didn’t go as planned. In search of a fix, they had tried the old method of planning, and it wasn’t working. Teams couldn’t agree on tactics, no one was able to make decisions, people were withholding information, and some groups were even sabotaging the plans. After a day of working through the customer-centric approach, the adversarial groups began to align around a common customer and build on shared objectives. Walls came down and teamwork shot up. They have since redesigned their operating model and are working together to deliver value at speed to their shared customer. 

Take Action
An impactful action you can take right now is to think about who you serve in how you and your team operate. Who is your primary customer? What do they want to accomplish in their jobs? What challenges are they struggling with? What benefits are they seeking? Are others in your group aligned around the same customer? That knowledge alone will propel the way you work to drive value. Join us on this journey of real transformative value!