Organisational transformation · operating models · governance
Teams go as far as the system lets them.
Beyond Agile diagnoses and redesigns what surrounds delivery — strategy, governance, funding, decision rights, structures and value flow — so the work produces measurable results for customers and the business.
Sounds familiar?
Most of these are not team problems
- Teams plan in two-week iterations. Funding is fixed once a year.
- An architecture decision takes months. A sprint takes two weeks.
- Priorities arrive through five channels, and each one is urgent.
- Governance rewards output and utilisation. The strategy asks for outcomes.
- Leaders ask for autonomy and keep directing execution.
- The teams were trained in agile. Finance, HR, procurement and architecture still work in sequence.
- The customer is in the vision statement and nowhere in the backlog.
Each of these has a mechanism behind it, and each mechanism can be changed. The three interventions below start there.
Three ways we intervene
Start where the constraint is
Audit
Find what is actually stopping value
We observe the organisation as it works, not as the operating model says it works: real meetings, real artefacts, real decision flows. The output is the list of systemic constraints and a backlog to remove them — not another maturity score.
About the audit →Governance
Design governance that speeds delivery up
Direction, decision rights, flow, funding, control and learning, designed so that decentralised execution is safe. Clear constraints instead of more approval layers. ISO- or COBIT-compliant where it has to be.
About governance →Reset
Trained, certified, and still not delivering
For organisations that did agile and are still waiting for the business results. We look at leadership, purpose, system and content, in that order, and change what is in the way.
About a reset →AI agents entering your operating model? The same lens applies: decision rights, guardrails and flow. AI in the operating model → Building the agents around your customer: Claint →
How we make change stick
Coaching · Facilitation · Experiential learning · Training
These are not services beside the three above. They are the craft that makes an operating-model change hold once the slides are gone: coaching for leaders, agile coaches, Product Owners and Scrum Masters; facilitation of planning and strategy sessions, from one team to rooms of several hundred; experiential learning with LEAT®, built on simulation and LEGO® Serious Play; training where a skill is missing, not where a certificate is.
High-performing organisations still need reflection and coaching. The goal is not dependence on an external coach, but enough internal capability to inspect and improve the system without one.
Results
One value stream-based operating model with Lean Portfolio Management governance, rolled out through a training and mentoring approach.
From technology silos to end-to-end product and platform teams: 11 teams became 6, without losing capacity and with higher throughput.
Twelve teams and their management layer refocused on customer value. Overhead down by more than a quarter while delivery went up.
A portfolio of four big bets and thirteen initiatives, none of which named a job a shopper has, rebuilt around six jobs households actually have.
Read the cases → Client names on request, under NDA.
Who you get
Martijn Oost
More than twenty-five years of Lean and agile work, fifteen of them inside Toyota, where I grew from developer to project lead and lived the move from waterfall to iterative delivery from the inside. Since then: transformations in telecom, public broadcasting, publishing, international rail, government digital services and retail, from scale-ups to organisations of several thousand people.
Agile and Lean are the toolkit, not the goal. The goal is a system in which decisions are taken where the information is, money follows value, and results are measured rather than reported.
Tell me what isn’t moving.
Governance, an audit, a reset, or a second opinion on a transformation that is stalling. I answer personally, usually the same day.