In November 2024, I wrote about modern growth drivers for small and medium-sized enterprises. Here is the link to that article: Modern SME Growth Drivers – Blue Monarch Management. Blue Monarch Management builds companies – and a critical element that must be designed correctly in every company is the operating model.
An operating model is the blueprint for how an organization delivers value to its customers or stakeholders. It defines the way a company organizes and aligns its resources, processes, people, and technology to execute its business strategy and achieve its goals.
Key components of an operating model typically include:
Processes: The workflows and systems that ensure consistent and efficient delivery of products or services.
People and Roles: The structure of teams, roles, and responsibilities that drive execution.
Technology: The tools and platforms that support operations and enable scalability or innovation.
Governance and Decision-Making: The framework for how decisions are made, who has authority, and how accountability is ensured.
Culture and Mindset: The behaviors, values, and norms that shape how work gets done within the organization.
In short, an operating model transforms a company’s strategic vision into daily actions and outcomes. It is like the “how” to the strategy’s “what.”
So why is velocity important?
Designing an operating model for high velocity means structuring a company’s processes, people, and technology to enable rapid decision-making, faster time-to-market, and swift responses to changes in the market or customer needs. It is about building agility and speed into the very DNA of the organization while maintaining consistency and quality.
To prioritize agility and flexibility, it is essential to streamline processes to cut down bureaucratic delays, create cross-functional teams that can collaborate swiftly without siloed communication, and empower employees to make decisions at the appropriate levels without waiting for top-down approvals. To foster speed, organizations should integrate technology that automates routine tasks and boosts productivity through AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation. Leveraging cloud-based platforms enables seamless data sharing and collaboration across teams and locations, while real-time analytics provide the necessary insights for swift, data-driven decision-making. To maintain a customer-centric focus, organizations should shape their operating models around customer needs by rapidly collecting and integrating feedback. This includes delivering iterative improvements, such as Minimum Viable Products, to meet evolving customer demands. Nurturing a high-velocity culture can be one of the more impactful elements of a high-velocity operating model, but also one of the most challenging to get right. Driving this kind of culture requires difficult and deep personal changes in staff to rid themselves of perfectionist behaviours in favour of encouraging experimentation and learning from failures, aligning organizational incentives with speed and innovation, and building leadership that supports quick adaptation and fosters trust among teams. To optimize resource deployment, organizations should implement dynamic resource allocation, allowing teams to adjust their focus based on priorities and market signals. Additionally, employing flexible workforce models, such as gig workers or strategic partnerships, can enable quick scaling during demand surges. Simplifying governance and decision-making involves establishing clear frameworks to ensure swift decisions with minimal friction, removing hierarchical layers, and creating a flatter organization to enhance communication and action speed.
Why does this matter?
Companies that operate at high velocity can outmaneuver competitors, meet customer expectations more effectively, and seize opportunities faster. This is especially critical for SMEs, as their smaller size often gives them an inherent advantage in pivoting and adapting compared to larger organizations, though I also believe that an operating model that has been designed to be nimble inside a large organization can create some nice advantages. This is, in part, why many large enterprises are investing heavily in enterprise resource planning systems that can automate work and upgrade the power of decision support systems.
Raising the velocity of an operating model involves redesigning systems, structures, and behaviors to enable quicker decision-making, faster execution, and adaptability. Streamlining processes involves automating repetitive tasks with tools like robotic process automation (RPA), eliminating workflow redundancies, and standardizing key procedures to create clear, repeatable processes for common tasks, saving time and enhancing efficiency. We can empower teams by decentralizing decision-making, encouraging cross-functional collaboration, and investing in training. This approach enables individuals and teams to make quick decisions without multiple levels of approval, breaks down silos by combining diverse expertise to solve problems faster, and equips employees with the necessary skills and tools to operate effectively in a high-velocity environment. I have lived through these kinds of changes – with the authority to make decisions and the power of information to support great decision-making – pushed out to the front lines of a business. Knowledge and empowerment drive speed.
To embed technology effectively, businesses might adopt agile tools like Trello, Asana, or Jira for enhanced agility and transparency, implement real-time data analytics using business intelligence platforms for faster decision-making, and leverage cloud-based solutions to enable seamless collaboration across locations and devices. Our firm has explored several solutions to help us speed up our work management and project management, finally landing on Clickup as a feature-rich, economical, and user-friendly solution that fully enables Agile consulting practices.
We can also foster a speed-oriented culture by rewarding quick, effective execution, encouraging experimentation with a “fail fast, learn faster” mindset, and focusing on continuous improvement through regular reviews and refinements based on feedback and performance metrics. Perhaps one of the most interesting design choices for a high-velocity operating model (interesting to me anyway!) is to optimize an organizational structure by flattening hierarchies, thereby speeding up communication and decision-making, dynamically allocating resources to the most needed areas, and introducing agile frameworks like Scrum or Kanban to enhance responsiveness. To boost organizational speed, we focus on both external and internal feedback loops. We listen to customers to quickly adjust products and services, monitor market trends to stay ahead of changes, and gather employee feedback to ensure internal processes align with team capabilities and challenges.
By implementing these strategies, companies can transform their operating models into systems capable of operating at high velocity. Over the next two articles, I will walk through some common barriers to raising the velocity of an operating model with some solutions and then will discuss the design and role of progressive management practices to power a high-velocity operating model.
About
Jeff Peterson is the Founder and CEO of Blue Monarch Management and is a professional Management Consultant specializing in Strategy, Governance, and Organizational Development for companies designing and driving transformational investments.
