Mini Case Study: Transforming the Operating Model at a European Financial Services Company

What does it mean to work with Northshore 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 organisation 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 organisation was not on track to achieve their strategic goals.

What they hoped to achieve

The organisation 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 organisation 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 Northshore approach

We determined that our partnership would look holistically at how strategy is translated into priorities and how value is delivered at this organisation. 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 organisation 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

Northshore’s areas of focus

To help organisations 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 organisational vision and strategy with execution priorities

• Connecting the dots from business strategy to delivery of customer experience, so the whole organisation 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 Northshore and how we might support your organisation’s transformation, don’t hesitate to get in touch!