Your operating model is the blueprint of your organisation. It provides a high-level design of your processes, systems and structures and helps your people understand how they deliver value. Optimising your current operating model can help you to refine your value, eliminate duplication, improve data flow and decision making and enhance supplier and partner relationships. 

Strategic Alignment

Your operating model sits at the nexus of your strategy and your customer – you need to be looking at both simultaneously.  If you don’t already have a strategy and if you’re yet to define your customer groups or beneficiaries – you need to start there. Strategic clarity amongst your organisation’s leaders is a must have.

Understanding your customers and the value you provide is crucial for your operating model. It may take some effort, but knowing how your offerings meet their needs can make a significant difference. Many organisations operate without fully grasping this important aspect.

Your business strategy should drive the design of your operating model, ensuring it aligns with your vision, purpose, values, and strategic priorities – the foundational pillars that define your organisation. Structuring your operations around these core elements is key to success.

Mapping how you create value for your customer

Once you’ve examined your strategy and customers, the next step in creating your model is to define how things, at a high level, are done to deliver value to your customer. You can map the products and services of your organisation through each step of their journey through your organisation.

This high-level process mapping is referred to as the “value chain”. There are, many ways to depict and visualise it. At CoLab, we like illustrating this using a high-level process diagram, but some organisations prefer an infographic describing the organisation. There are no strict rules here – you can use whichever approach makes the most sense to you and your context.

Streamlining your organisation to deliver value efficiently and effectively

With your strategy and customer value defined and understood, everything else in your business should align with it. Your organisational structure, people, processes, technology, data and reporting — everything. Everything and everyone in your organisation should be focused on how they fit into the strategy and how they contribute to the value delivered to customers. At CoLab, we focus on six key components to codesign your target operating model and we leave you with a roadmap to put it into action.  

Based on the POLISM Operating Model Canvas (Campbell, Gutierrez and Lancelott)

Have you looked at your operating model lately? If not, now is the time.