Assured Velocity

The Velocity Brief

Straight talk on transformation, technology, AI, data and people leadership for mid-market operators. No vendor spin. No consultant waffle. Just what actually works.

This Month

Your operating model stopped fitting your business two years ago.

In This Issue

01   The Hard Truth

Growth does not break businesses. Outgrowing the structure that enabled the growth does.

Every mid-market business has an operating model - whether it was designed or not. The way decisions get made. The way accountability is distributed. The way teams are structured, how they interact, how performance is measured and reported. In most cases this model was not deliberately designed. It evolved. It worked at £15m and it more or less worked at £25m. At £40m it is visibly straining. At £60m it is a structural constraint on further growth.

The problem with an operating model that has been outgrown is that the symptoms look like other problems. Leaders feel they have a people problem - when actually they have a role clarity problem. They feel they have a delivery problem - when actually they have a governance and accountability problem. They feel they have a technology problem - when actually the technology is being asked to compensate for a structural gap it was never designed to fill.

None of these are HR problems or communication problems. They are operating model problems. And they do not resolve through better meetings, better tools or better people. They resolve through deliberate redesign of the structure that sits underneath all of those things.

02   The Framework

5 Signals Your Operating Model Has Stopped Working

Each signal maps to a domain where the operating model is creating friction. Three or more means the model needs deliberate attention - not incremental adjustment.

03   Real World

The £45M Legal Services Business That Hired Six Senior People and Got Slower

Anonymised for client confidentiality

The business had grown from £18m to £45m over four years - largely through acquisition and organic growth in two new service lines. The CEO's response to the delivery pressure that came with that growth was logical: hire more senior people. Six director-level hires in 18 months. Each one capable. Each one well-intentioned. The business got slower, not faster.

What the operating model review found:

12 weeks of operating model redesign. Results at 6 months:

Partner Articles

From the Front Line

All four partners on operating model - from performance, architecture, governance and process. Each domain sees a different part of the same problem.

The Operating Model Is the Container. The Processes Are What Goes In It. Get the Container Wrong and Nothing Fits.

I have spent 25 years improving operational performance. The most common mistake I see is process improvement work that is done in isolation from the operating model that contains it. You redesign the workflow. You reduce the waste. You improve the throughput. And three months later the improvement has degraded because the structure around the process - the accountability, the reporting, the incentives - was never aligned to support the new way of working.

Process improvement without operating model alignment is temporary. The process reverts to whatever the model incentivises. If the model rewards individual team performance, cross-functional process improvements will not stick - because the teams will optimise for their own metrics rather than the end-to-end outcome. If the model does not have a clear owner for the customer journey, customer journey improvements will not be sustained - because nobody is accountable for maintaining them.

At Network Rail the scale of the efficiency programme - over £200m - required that operating model and process work were designed together from the outset. Every process improvement was mapped against the accountability structure to confirm that someone was responsible for sustaining it. Where that accountability did not exist, the model was adjusted before the process change was implemented. Not after. Before.

If your improvement programmes are not sticking - if the gains erode within a quarter of the project closing - the question is not whether your improvement methodology is correct. The question is whether your operating model is designed to sustain what the improvement programme delivered.

Joe Kay has delivered over £100m in operational savings across 100+ programmes including Network Rail, BCG, Aviva and HSBC.  Connect on LinkedIn

Your Technology Architecture Reflects the Operating Model You Had. Not the One You Need.

Enterprise architecture - the way your technology systems, integrations and data flows are structured - is a direct reflection of the operating model that existed when those decisions were made. When the operating model changes and the architecture does not, you end up with a technology estate that actively works against the new model. Systems that do not talk to each other across the new organisational boundaries. Data that lives in the wrong place for the teams that now need it. Integrations that connect the wrong things in the wrong sequence.

In post-acquisition scenarios this is almost universal. The acquired business has its own technology estate, its own data model, its own integration architecture. Combining two operating models without combining the underlying architecture produces a technology landscape that serves neither model well - and creates integration debt that compounds with every subsequent change.

The practical implication is that operating model redesign and enterprise architecture review should happen simultaneously - not sequentially. If you redesign the operating model without updating the architecture, the technology will constrain the new model within months. If you update the architecture without redesigning the operating model, you will have rebuilt the infrastructure of a structure that no longer fits the business.

The businesses that manage this well treat their enterprise architecture as a living document - reviewed and updated whenever the operating model changes significantly. The businesses that manage it badly treat it as a historical record of decisions made by people who have since left.

Richard Danks specialises in technology governance, enterprise architecture and CTO recovery across banking, defence and SaaS.  Connect on LinkedIn

You Cannot Govern What Your Operating Model Has Not Defined.

Programme governance - the structures, authorities and reporting mechanisms that allow a board to manage large-scale change - depends entirely on the operating model beneath it. If the operating model does not define who owns what, who can decide what, and how performance is measured and reported, then programme governance has nothing to attach to. You can have the most rigorous governance framework in the world. If the accountability boundaries beneath it are unclear, the framework is cosmetic.

I see this most acutely in businesses that are running large programmes during periods of operating model change - which, in practice, is most of them. The programme is trying to deliver against a target state. The operating model is simultaneously shifting. The result is a governance structure that is trying to manage a moving target with metrics that no longer reflect how the business has agreed to measure success.

The practical fix is to treat operating model clarity as a prerequisite of programme governance - not a parallel workstream. Before you establish the programme board, confirm the accountability structure it is governing into. Before you define the programme metrics, confirm the operating model defines the outcomes those metrics are measuring. Before you assign programme ownership, confirm the programme owner has the authority the operating model needs them to have.

Governance is only as strong as the model it governs. Get the model right first.

Brian Ford led the largest banking transformation in Europe at Bank of Ireland and has delivered programmes at EY, Capgemini, Barclays Capital and JPMorgan.  Connect on LinkedIn

The Customer Does Not Care About Your Org Chart. Design the Operating Model From Their Journey Outward.

Most operating models are designed from the inside out. Start with the leadership structure. Define the teams. Assign responsibilities. The customer journey is then expected to fit around the structure the business has created for its own convenience. In a simple business at small scale this works well enough. As the business grows and the customer journey becomes more complex, the inside-out model creates friction at every organisational boundary the customer has to cross.

The most effective operating model redesigns I have been involved in start from the customer journey and work inward. Map every touchpoint. Map every handoff. Map every point where the customer is passed between teams, between systems, between processes. Then design the operating model to minimise that friction - assigning accountability at the level of the customer outcome rather than the internal function.

In financial services and legal businesses I have worked with, the shift from function-based accountability to outcome-based accountability has consistently produced the fastest measurable improvements in customer satisfaction - faster than process redesign alone, faster than technology investment, faster than additional headcount. Because it removes the structural cause of the customer experience gap rather than trying to compensate for it through individual effort.

If your customer satisfaction is not where it should be despite genuine effort from your teams - draw the customer journey first. Then draw your operating model over the top of it. The places where they do not align are your redesign priorities.

Tom Henry has delivered 50% lead time reductions and double-digit FTE savings across financial services, legal and energy sectors.  Connect on LinkedIn

The One Thing - Do This This Month

Draw your customer journey. Then draw your operating model over the top of it.

One afternoon. Two diagrams. The places where they do not align are the places where your operating model is creating customer friction, delivery friction, or both. You do not need a consultant to do this exercise. You need a whiteboard, your operations lead, and someone who talks to customers regularly.

If the output of that exercise raises more questions than it answers - or if you recognise three or more of the five signals in this issue - an operating model Rapid Triage with Assured Velocity is 30 minutes. We will give you a clear, written view of where the structural friction is and what it would take to address it. No pitch. No pressure.

Next Month in The Velocity Brief

"Why your best people are leaving - and it is not about the money."

The people and change signals that precede every significant talent exit in mid-market businesses - and what the operating model, governance and delivery structure have to do with retention.

Assured Velocity

Fractional Transformation Office for Mid-Market Businesses (£10M to £100M)
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