Introducing
We build high-performing organizations, creating measurable business impact, from tens to thousands of people.
We put you at the centre: your business, your priorities, your people.
You have all kinds of challenges, opportunities, constraints and cultures, right across your organization. They are continually evolving. So we flex and adapt with you.
Scalable, dependable, never identical
is a fresh approach to business agility. No prescriptive frameworks, no instant reorgs, no made-up roles, no cutesy jargon. Just experienced professionals who will meet you where you are, help you make sense of your landscape, and work with you to optimize your organization, one tangible step at a time.
Our simple and effective model has been accelerating teams of 50 to 500 people, in organizations from start-ups to scale-ups to household-name enterprises, for well over a decade. We adapt our approach to your scale, your business environment, and most importantly to your priorities, to deliver a light-touch, high-impact engagement.
Often, small changes can have a big payoff if you know where to look, so we ‘seek first to understand’. We listen, observe and measure before proposing any changes.
These two examples, from our case studies, show the impact of starting in the right place.
Doubling throughput, twice
How can 400 people go faster, deliver more, without new investment?
A large bank had rolled out a cookie-cutter scaling framework for 400 people across two sites. In one location, everything was going fine. In the other, the delivery rate had tanked, morale was low, key systems were at risk. What was going wrong?
We started with two days of Initial Assessment, to listen to people and understand their context. We learned that the teams in one location were working on greenfield applications that any of the teams could pick up. In the other location, there were dozens of legacy systems, with decades of technologies, data models, business rules and other quirks.
They had been arranged into ‘feature teams’, so the key people who understood these systems were now in arbitrary teams, each with its own backlog of work. For any work that needed specialist knowledge, the team would be blocked, waiting on a specialist in another team. Meanwhile that team would also be blocked, waiting on a different specialist, and so on. They had built an elaborate deadlock of key knowledge! No wonder nothing was getting done.
To rectify this, we identified the likely work for the next few quarters and used this to run three Demand-Led Planning sessions, in which programme teams of 60-80 people self-organized around the anticipated demand. This meant that the key people were in the right places so they could transfer critical knowledge to other team members.
Getting 90 people facing the same way
How can we ensure all the work is aligned across a business-critical programme of 12 teams?
While the ultimate goal was to align priorities and direction across the programme, the initial challenge was fragmentation and a lack of transparency. There were a dozen teams all doing different things in different ways, and no one knew who was working on what, or where the work was getting stuck.
When we arrived, some teams were using Scrum, others Kanban, others something else again. They were sure we would tell them all to work the same way.
But we did not. Instead, we said to carry on doing whatever works for you. We just asked each team to report three metrics every fortnight: how long did each completed work item take; how many items did you finish; and how many are you working on right now? These are the flow metrics of lead time, throughput and work-in-process respectively. We did not even specify what a ‘work item’ was! Each team decided for themselves; a work item for a mobile app team was likely to be different from that of a platform service team.
This data, along with asking what each team was working on, provided a consistent programme-level dashboard that they could start using to make decisions. Only then were they ready to take on programme-scale prioritization and planning, which is what we did next.
Why ?
Lots of folks are offering ’transformation solutions’. Why talk to us?
Because transformation should be measurable and accountable
While a change programme does not have deliverables as such, you can still measure its effectiveness. takes the view that you should track both operational metrics and behaviour change.
We frame the success criteria for an engagement in these terms, for example, halve the time to ship a new feature, or increase collaboration between programme managers. We design the work to make this impact visible.
At , we believe that if you cannot measure the value of a change programme, then you probably should not be starting yet!
Because business agility is bigger than IT
Most digital change initiatives begin and end in the IT department. Lasting change needs to involve colleagues right across the organization, from the Sales, Marketing and Product folks, through operational functions like HR, Finance, Compliance and Security, right through to your Support and Customer Care stakeholders.
takes a holistic view of transformation, engaging with folks across the organization as partners, advisers and collaborators, putting risk and governance front and centre, and measuring the impact across the whole organization.
Because a framework should adapt to you, not the other way round
Big consultancies come in with a ready-made blueprint which they ‘deploy’ into your organization at huge cost and disruption, and when it does not work then you were doing it wrong. We know this approach rarely succeeds, having cleared up after too many failed, multi-year ’transformations’.
works with you to understand what is holding your organization back—slowing you down and costing you money—be it structural, technical, operational, or cultural. We design a programme that will meet your needs, which we monitor and adapt as things change. We apply established techniques and methods to meet your unique requirements.