Operating model
Management consulting
The unglamorous work of making a company run: who decides what, how work reaches the people who do it, and where the process is quietly costing you.
Companies rarely fail at strategy. They fail at the join between strategy and Tuesday. Decisions have no owner, work arrives through four channels, the same question gets answered differently depending on who is asked, and nobody has written any of it down.
This service is about that join. We map how the organisation actually operates rather than how the org chart says it does, find the places where the two disagree, and fix the ones that cost money or morale. The output is a company that runs the same way on a bad week as a good one.
What you get
Named artefacts, not a slide pack. Each one is a thing your team can open, run, or hand to an auditor.
| Artefact | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Operating model map | How work actually flows today, drawn from observation and interviews rather than from the org chart. |
| Decision rights | A plain table of who decides, who is consulted and who is merely informed, for the decisions that currently stall. |
| Process redesign | The two or three processes where the cost is highest, reworked with the handoffs named and the failure points instrumented. |
| Role definitions | What each role owns and is accountable for, written so two people can tell whether a thing is theirs. |
| Meeting and reporting rhythm | What is discussed where, how often, and what evidence is brought. Usually this deletes meetings. |
| Change plan | Sequenced, with the order chosen so the first change makes the second easier rather than harder. |
How it runs
01 · 1–2 weeks
Frame
Interviews, observation and document review. Ends with a written diagnosis you are free to disagree with.
02 · 2–4 weeks
Prove
One process reworked end to end, in the real business, so the approach is tested on something that matters before it is generalised.
03 · 6–12 weeks
Build
The rest of the redesign, sequenced, with the documentation written as we go rather than at the end.
04 · 2–4 weeks
Hand over
Ownership assigned to named people, with the review rhythm running for at least two cycles before we step out.
What we use
Chosen per engagement against your constraints. We have no reseller relationships and no incentive to recommend one of these over another.
Process
Tooling
Finance and admin
Measurement
What we do not do
Knowing where our usefulness stops saves everyone a procurement cycle.
- We do not produce a strategy deck and leave. Everything in this service is judged on whether the company operates differently ninety days later.
- We do not run redundancy programmes or performance-manage your staff. Where a structure needs to change we will say so and help you plan it, but the employment decisions and the conversations are yours.
- We do not install a methodology wholesale. Agile, lean and their relatives are useful sources of ideas and poor substitutes for looking at your actual constraint.
- We do not recommend software as the fix for an accountability problem. New tooling on an unclear process reliably produces an unclear process with a subscription.
Questions we are asked
How is this different from hiring an operations manager?
It is not a substitute for one, and in a lot of cases the honest recommendation at the end of Frame is that you should hire one. The difference is scope and duration: we come in to change how the thing works and leave, where an operations manager runs it continuously. If you already have that person and things still stall, the problem is usually structural rather than a capacity issue, and that is what this addresses.
Will you talk to our staff directly?
Yes, and the engagement does not work otherwise. We agree the framing with you first, we are clear with everyone that we are not there to assess individuals, and we do not attribute quotes. What people describe in those conversations is almost always the diagnosis.
We are five people. Is this too early?
Often, yes, and we will tell you. At five people the informal arrangements are usually cheaper than the process that would replace them. The moment it becomes worth doing is normally when the founder has become a routing layer for decisions and the day is full of unblocking rather than deciding.
What if leadership disagrees on the diagnosis?
That disagreement is itself a finding and it usually explains why the problem persisted. We write the diagnosis down, including where the leadership team sees it differently, and put the disagreement in front of everyone at once. Resolving it is a precondition for the rest of the work, not a step we can route around.
Start with what is in the way.
Most of this work is shaped by the obstacle rather than the ambition. A deal that keeps stalling at the same stage, a process nobody owns, a product that will not sell, a decision that has been open for months. Tell us yours and we will say honestly whether we are the right people for it.