How the Process Model can help us to design an Operating Model?

Designing and building an Operating Model is not an easy endeavor. Even though the ideas behind the structure and relationships proposed can sound logical, is difficult to support the idea of changing the Operating Model if there is not a clear proposal of how it will work.

As we have described earlier in this blog, an Operating Model is  an abstract representation of how an organization operates across process, organization and technology domains in order to accomplish its function. The architecture of the Operating Model has to reflect the strategy and it should reflect how the value will be delivered to the client, and the strategic competitive advantages that it will bring to the company. As we mentioned, we proposed to design an Operating Model through the following steps (see this previous entry):

A first step in this sense is to correlate the Business Process Model with the entities created in the Operating Model. Let´s illustrate is with an example:

1) Let´s suppose that we design a Operating Model that has four entities: a Corporate function, Business Units, a Shared Services Center and a set of Centers of Excellence.

2) Our Process Model has a segment for example like this:

3) Our next step to create to correlate the to-be process architecture is to map every process into the defined entities, using criteria like: function seggregation, specialization, governance, client centricity, go-to-market, transaccionality, etc. We can do the mapping at the level we require, although to be feasible, I would recommend to get at least to level 4.

With these steps, it will be clear what is the role/responsibility of each Operating Model entity and how the end-to-end process is executed through the organization.