Your transformation can be fully active and still leave the operating model unchanged.
Workstreams launch. Milestones turn green. The plan moves. But if you are accountable for the transformation, the harder question is whether the way the enterprise produces value actually changed.
The operating modelAn operating model is a collection of integrated end-to-end value streams and lifecycles/workflows engineered and orchestrated to produce scalable value.
That is the layer ZBTOS teaches you to work on.
Define what must become true. Read the work against it. Govern the change until the evidence holds.
Two models make the work explicit.
One defines what your operating model must make true. The other shows how to read the work moving through it. Your teams learn to use both, so the sponsor gets one definition of the change, read the same way by every team that carries it.
Five questions every operating requirement must answer.
The bridge from strategy to the operating model holds only when all five are answered. Take one out and watch what reaches the other side. Your teams learn to write requirements that answer all five before the work is funded.
Your business already runs through five functions: GET, SORT, DO, PROVE and IMPROVE. The question is whether anyone can see, govern and improve how they work together.
Five functions. Six ways to read them.
Hold the five still, follow one flow through them, or see every flow at once. Three of the six reads, each answering a different question about where the transformation stops producing value. Your teams learn to read their own flows this way, so the sponsor sees where value is lost before the next phase is approved.
The five standing operating functions
Read down the system. Each function is a standing part of the operating model, with its own entry conditions, logic, evidence and owners — present whether or not anyone is managing it.
Business work moving through them
Read across the flow. A unit of business work travels the functions in phases — and the questions worth asking are where it slows, loops, bypasses a gate, or arrives with no governed origin.
The integrated execution path
Read the whole thing at once: the cross-functional conditions, handoffs, decision rights and accountabilities that must be enabled for the system to work. This is where most transformations are actually lost.
See it. Learn it. Apply it.
Usually after a trigger: a new CEO, an acquisition to integrate, an audit finding, a platform decision.
Training, assessment and support for transformation capability.
Carrying an external mandate? ETEGY →