Clarify the support model

About the Role

For organizations whose structure, accountabilities, work placement, capacity, or decision rights no longer fit the strategy or the way value must flow. This work designs the operating model around the promises, not the boxes, ensuring the model connects promises, flow, capabilities, work placement, decision rights, capacity, systems, measures, and leadership routines into one executable model.

Process Overview

• Begin with promises: Define the outcomes and obligations the operating model exists to support.
• Design the flow: Determine where work should enter, move, pause, escalate, and complete.
• Place authority with accountability: Align decision rights, professional judgment, ownership, and escalation.
• Match capacity to demand: Design roles, sites, shared services, technology, and support around the real work and variability.

Deliverables

• Target operating model: A practical design for work, roles, authority, capacity, systems, and governance.
• Decision-rights map: Clear ownership for recurring decisions, exceptions, handoffs, and enterprise tradeoffs.
• Work-placement logic: What should remain local, become shared, centralize, automate, or stay close to the customer.
• Transition blueprint: A sequenced path that protects essential promises while moving to the future model.

Key Assessment Areas

• Service: Service-level expectations, speed, urgency, special handling, customer or patient experience, clinical need, contract requirements, and whether every segment needs the same level of service.
• Work: Workflow placement, centralization potential, local versus shared work, routing rules, handoffs, exception management, quality checks, and system sequence.
• Network: Site logic, hub design, inventory placement, fulfillment lanes, parcel zones, service geography, labor availability, capacity, and operational causes behind long-distance or high-cost work.
• Risk: Regulatory constraints, licensure requirements, quality controls, staffing model, leadership capacity, system limitations, data visibility, and post-close or transformation execution risk.

Practical Outcomes

A clearer view of where the model creates value, cost, risk, and avoidable complexity. Engagements can be scoped as:

• Diligence diagnostic
• Service-level review
• Network and workflow assessment
• Cost-to-serve review
• Operating-risk blueprint

• Operating thesis check: A practical view of whether the service, workflow, labor, network, and support model can support the investment or transformation thesis.
• Complexity and cost map: A clearer picture of where cost is driven by service levels, handoffs, exception handling, network choices, or inherited operating habits.
• Constraint reality view: A distinction between requirements that materially matter and assumptions creating unnecessary drag.
• Execution priority roadmap: A capacity-paced, dependency-aware sequence for what to validate, redesign, preserve, centralize, standardize, or address after the decision is made.

Common Questions

• When is Operating Model Design useful? For organizations whose structure, accountabilities, work placement, capacity, or decision rights no longer fit the strategy or the way value must flow.
• What does the work typically produce? Evidence-based findings, practical decision logic, a sequenced path forward, and the ownership, measures, and routines appropriate to the engagement.
• How is the scope determined? The work is bounded around the decision, promises at risk, processes, teams, sites, evidence, exclusions, and definition of done agreed with the client.
• How does Scale That Works avoid creating dependency? The method is explained as it is used, client leaders participate in the work, and tools, judgment, standards, and routines are transferred at a level proportionate to the scope.

Related Insights

• The Operating Model Is the Strategy Test: Why strategy only becomes real when the work, roles, decisions, metrics, and routines can support it.
• Do Not Average Away the Truth: Why averages hide variation, cost, effort, service friction, and the operating segments that need different choices.
• Strategy Does Not Scale Without an Operating Rhythm: Execution needs clear priorities, owners, decisions, escalation, and follow-through.

Engagement Options

• Free self-assessment: Reflection and initial pattern recognition useful for internal discussion, early concern framing, and deciding whether a closer look is warranted.
• Paid diligence: Independent evidence and decision support that validates findings, pressure-tests the operating model, identifies execution risk, and defines a Sequenced Transition Path.