#262 – Target Operating Model

Luckily, we have a workshop to fix this.

When organisations pay expensive external consultants to help them create a Target Operating Model, they often end up with an extensive PowerPoint presentation that covers all imaginable and unimaginable aspects of how to run your business. It looks good, and the level of details is high (only the number of slides is higher).

After the consultants have handed over their divine delivery and moved on to the next victims looking for a useless Target Operating Model, you look into the consultants’ work and realise that the PowerPoint slides are so far from reality that their content cannot be implemented. Having learned the concept of “sunk cost”, you accept that the money is gone for ever, and find a poor middle manager who you force to recreate a new and actually useful Operating Model (“because it’s good for your career”).

So, you then actually end up with a potentially useful Target Operating Model, but we all know that it has been produced in an Ivory Tower by the lonely soul (any claims that they have involved others are definitely false). Your task is now to involve the rest of the organisation and, in particular, the agile teams who will be living and breathing the Target Operation Model. These innocent, but knowledgable people can also spot the shortcomings and risks in it, while also having the experience and creativity to mitigate the risks.