Mini Case Study: Transforming the Operating Model at a European Financial Services Company
What does it mean to work with Heath & Sea on your transformation journey? Here is a mini case study based on our engagement with a leading European financial services company.
Before: A lack of cohesion between execution priorities and business strategy
This large organization faced a common struggle—silos between strategy, marketing, product, and technical teams led to a lack of cohesion. And while the company had defined and communicated their corporate strategy, this didn’t translate into the day-to-day priorities employees were focused on. Each function was focussed on solving their respective issues. These challenges (and many more) led executives to worry that the organization was not on track to achieve their strategic goals.
What they hoped to achieve
The organization defined their overall goal as improving their alignment and transparency between strategy and speed of execution, essentially rethinking their operating model. We then partnered with the organization to come up with a list of more specific goals we’d aim to achieve through our engagement. These included:
Make customer outcomes the focus (rather than functional project outputs) and create a more cohesive customer experience
Become more nimble at delivering bold changes across the customer journey and accelerate the pace from idea to execution
Bring more data to decision-making and flexibility to adapt based on learnings
Create an operating framework that aligns priorities
Enable a culture that allows for rapid innovation
The Heath & Sea approach
We determined that our partnership would look holistically at how strategy is translated into priorities and how value is delivered at this organization. This involved creating cross-functional, persistent teams to deliver valuable customer outcomes and an enabling governance framework. We take product principles and apply them to evolve the operating model. Here’s how we approached this:
We discovered how the organization worked through research and analysing data. We also followed teams as they developed products and observed leaders prioritising and assessing progress. This allowed us to understand the current state of the client’s operating model
We designed a new operating model together (including structure, decision making, ways of working and capabilities) to achieve the goals they set at the beginning of our engagement
We defined how we would implement these changes and measure their success
We activated the new operating model together, which involved coaching executives, managers, and teams
We iterated the new model based on what worked in their context
Heath & Sea’s areas of focus
To help organizations achieve their goal of delivering more value in a sustainable manner, we partner with our clients to create a holistic operating model. This involves:
Aligning organizational vision and strategy with execution priorities
Connecting the dots from business strategy to delivery of customer experience, so the whole organization is clear on priorities
Setting up cross-functional teams aligned around customer journeys with shared outcomes
Teaching customer-centric, lean, and agile principles, practices, and tools
Cultivating new mindsets and behaviours that enable outcomes-focus, collaboration, and data-driven decision making
To learn more about working with Heath & Sea and how we might support your organization’s transformation, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
