Upstream Advisory I Performance

Flexible Operating Model

Imagination will take you everywhere

Change Better. We support companies to structurally improve their business…

In a world of constant disruption companies are struggling. Are you interested to (be)come future proof? Companies must (re)think carefully how to become more flexible. Are you ready to step into the Agile Release Train? Based on our experience, we share a structured approach to establish a Flexible Operating Model.

If you don't win people's hearts, you don't make real change happen


Customer Journey


Get your head around the end2end customer journey. Why do they buy your product? How much are they willing to pay for? Understand where the market is today. Anticipate on how it will evolve tomorrow. Imagine the future. Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere 



Leadership


Demonstrate leadership and empower individuals and teams to become self-organizing. Agile Team Setup is also a proven way of working to accelerate growth and drive performance.



Agile Team Setup


Break down the silo's and establish cross functional teams to improve the customer journey. Every team consists of the business owner, scrum master, product owner, developer(s) and subject matter experts. To drive performance dedication (100% commitment/ no side business and working in the same room is part of the recipe for success. In general they are organised around three phases


- Design and Development

- Operations and Support

- Marketing and Sales



Agile Way of Working


Establish agile release trains (hereafter : "ART") to encourage the development of high performing, cross functional teams. This approach will result in less bureaucracy, delays and overhead as well as much higher throughput.


The work process of an ART is as follows; Define, Build, Test, Deploy, Release and Operate. ART should deliver Continuous Improvement (10-12 weekprogram cycles), driving Customer Value


Start small. Do not try to boil the ocean at once. Develop pilot projects in short sprints. Approach key stakeholders to help and support the roll-out of any pilot program. Those who sign up are your change agents and will show ownership.



Value Creation


Stop overcomplicating. Keep it simple in order to become an adaptable organization. Start to develop a project charter. Scope the project and prioritize key initiatives. Organizations must think carefully where they allocate resources (equipment, people and money) and time.



Plan, Do/ Test, Check, Act


Break down the body of work to be done into pieces. What are key strategic initiatives? Prioritize based on effort versus impact, with quick wins up to idea catalog.


                                                                 

                                                        - Plan : ahead the activities to be done on a timetable


                                                        - Do/ Test : execute the plan. Start small and run a test in controlled circumstances


                                                        - Check : analyse the test results and find the root cause of the problems

                                                       

                                                        - Act : take action to standardize or improve the process, as the new standard baseline





Visual Management


Marketing will drive brand value and visual management enables data driven leadership. Always interpret numbers and graphs. What do you see? Better precise information about a part of the population than vague information about the whole population.


…with our head in the sky and feet in the mud