[Infographic] 14 Organisational Components Every Cloud Operating Model Should Be Built On
Before you design and implement your cloud operating model, make sure you’re clear on the 14 organisational components that every cloud operating model should be built on.
For more detail on these components, and for an in-depth look at how to harness the full benefits of the cloud, read our white paper, Building a Cloud Operating Model Brick by Brick: A Blueprint for Transformation Success.
1. Purpose, Mission & Vision
Ask yourself why you do the things you do and where you want to get to as an organisation. Then when you start thinking about cloud, you’ll think of it less as a technology project, and more as an enabler to help achieve this purpose, mission and vision.
2. Cultural Framework, Values & Behaviours
Our cultural framework, values and behaviours define who we are both as an organisation, and also the character of people we want to work with. Your cultural framework is the DNA of your organisation and should inform every decision, so make sure your framework, values and behaviours are aligned with the ethos of cloud capability.
3. Business Strategy
When adopting cloud, nothing should be done just for the sake of it. Every decision should be made to enable your organisation and move it forward. Be careful not to get caught treating the cloud like another tech project when in reality it involves a far bigger organisation-wide transformation.
4. Technology Strategy
A clear technology strategy can act as the starting gun that rallies a portfolio of successful initiatives to transform an organisation and move them towards public cloud.
5. Measurable Business & Technology Outcomes
Make sure you’re clear on your reasons for adopting cloud technology and making changes to your operating model, by identifying, baselining and mapping your leading KPIs to specific treatment patterns.
6. Operating Principles
Operating principles are different from your values. Rather than referring to behaviours that are demonstrated by your people, these are the ingredients that shape the decisions you make about how your business will look, feel and run. They guide everything from policy and procedures, through to tool choices and team playbooks.
7. Team Topologies
Inspired by the proven approach by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, we recommend organising your teams into four standard team types (Complex Specialist, Enablement & Uplift, Platform Stewardship and Value Delivery) that will simplify business operations and give everyone clarity over their duties.
8. Operating Modes
While there isn’t a single golden “way of operating”, we’ve found that Consumption Solutions, Sustain Solutions, Optimise Solutions, and Growth Solutions are the four operating modes that work best.
9. Scaling
Whatever size team you’re building, we recommend first creating a single cross-functional team (or squad) built on business, facilitation, governance and engineering skills that will own the end-to-end journey and delivery of a particular portfolio of solutions. Then, as you get busier, divide, seed and grow into several smaller squads.
10. Forums
Ongoing collaboration via regular forums is key to any successful cloud transformation and includes everything from retrospectives and capability syncs through to company-wide gatherings and quarterly planning sessions.
11. Capabilities: Business & Technology
A Shared Accountability Model will help articulate which capabilities across the various cloud areas of concern belong to which teams.
12. Journeys
Internally your business provides many IT products and services that are made up of several smaller, budding products and services to create an end-to-end compelling proposition for teams to consume or purchase. The journey is every step, artefact and process required to design, plan, deliver, operate, support and continually enhance this proposition.
13. Team/Org Structure
Team structures will vary from organisation to organisation but an organisational structure built for success in the cloud will usually include some form of executive owner, business owner, and, if large enough, a portfolio owner, who tends to have their own separate dedicated budgets and steer.
14. Enabling Technology
While technology isn’t really at the core of an operating model, we recommend keeping your approach simple; leave it to the individual teams to write their own playbooks, allowing those to be shared and developed organically throughout the community.
