Align Your Operating Model With Your Strategy

Welcome to creating agile organizations

Design an organization that moves with your strategy.

What if your operating model helped you seize opportunities faster than the competition?
What if your teams were built for adaptability, alignment, and speed?

At Creating Agile Organizations, we give you the tools to make that a reality.

Shape the organization to support your strategy

Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) is a systemic approach designed to help you align your organizational design with your strategic goals. It offers a clear path to evolve a tailored operating model—one that fits your unique context and enables strategy execution. 

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The CAO guide

Navigating agile organization design with the CAO guide.

Evolve your Agile operating model: Master agile design with the CAO guide! Learn principles, axioms, and essentials to navigate today’s business. Download now to start your journey to agility and success!

To access your free CAO Guide and keep updated on the latest CAO developments, please enter your details below.

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Experience reports

Explore real-world application of Creating Agile Organizations.

PashaPay Case: improving Agility with CAO

PashaPay Case: improving Agility with CAO By Ilia Pavlichenko – Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. PashaPay is an Azerbaijani fintech that launched in 2022. Its mission is to enable every person to manage their money anytime and anywhere. The company has...

Incremental Change in E-Commerce Product Development

Incremental Change in E-Commerce Product Development By Konstantin Ribel – Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. Preface This experience report provides an insightful look into the gradual transformation of an e-commerce platform's product development...

FiloGrant’s Agile Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

FiloGrant's Agile Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic By Jeroen Valkier – Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. Business Adaptability to Face Covid-19 Lockdown and Social Distancing FiloGrant provides and fulfills custom made financial services for...

Applying CAO Guidelines at a Big German Insurance Company 

Applying CAO Guidelines at a Big German Insurance Company  By Wolfgang Steffens – Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. This experience report describes in hindsight the beginning of the Agile journey of the IT department Terra. This IT department was part...

Designing organizational structures, inside-out? Outside-in? Mixed?

Designing organizational structures, inside-out? Outside-in? Mixed? by Jurgen de Smet - Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. When one designs an organization's structures, one can decide to do this either with an outside-in view from the end user...

When you sub optimize, it’ll bite you in the ass.

When you sub-optimize, it’ll bite you in the ass. by Jurgen de Smet - Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. A Hard Team Setup Constraint A client of mine came to me with a problem. They wanted to improve transparency in their product development...

Shared Services Internal Product At BMW / Autonomous Driving

Shared Services Internal Product At BMW / Autonomous Driving by Denis Sunny - Certified Creating Agile Organizations Trainer. Introduction In the modern world, many consider Agile as a critical success factor at least for product-centric and customer-centric...

Certified training

Learn how to design organizations that deliver your strategy.

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Designing Agile Organizations

Who Should Attend?

Leaders, architects, and change agents shaping organizations for strategic agility.

Why Attend?
In just 2 days, gain the tools and mindset to design Agile organizations that truly deliver on strategy.
Learn how to align structure, roles, and coordination with what your business needs most—speed, autonomy, and adaptability.

Guiding Agile Organizations course

Guiding Agile Organizations

 Who Should Attend?

Change leaders, Agile coaches, and transformation leads driving organizational change.

Why Attend?
This immersive 3-day workshop equips you with the tools and coaching skills to guide successful Agile transformations.
Walk away with practical techniques to align your organization with strategic goals and enable real change at every level.

Hear from whose Who’ve been there

Participants from companies like Volkswagen Digital Solutions, Thales, Rabobank, Malvern-Panalytical, KPN, ING, Zuehlke, Raiffeisenbank, Prowareness and more have attended…

Last week I spent interesting 2 days in a training on ‘Designing agile organizations’. It turns out there is no single approach or integrated framework to address this challenge. We all need to find the answers ourselves. But thanks to Cesario Ramos we have now a toolbox of proven methods and techniques to face the challenge! Great training!

Markus Schweizer | Senior Strategy Advisor

Many thanks for the awesome training, Cesario!

Timo Kytola | Senior Agile Coach at Volkswagen Infotainment

Really enjoyed the Designing Agile Organizations course! Learning alongside such an insightful group truly enhanced the experience. The practical examples provided, also from Strobbo, added significant value. For me, this course complements the LeSS practitioner course I previously followed, broadening the scope from multi-team Scrum to full product groups and beyond. Let the experiments begin! Thank you Jurgen De Smet for an inspiring 2 days!

Michael Voorhaen | Product Owner at Strobbo

got questions?

Chat with us on WhatsApp. We’ll help you decide if the course fits your goals.

Benefits of CAO

Improved Strategy Execution
CAO aligns teams, priorities, and organizational design with clear strategic goals.

Enhanced Flexibility and Responsiveness
It builds the capability to adapt quickly to evolving market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies.

High-Performing Groups
CAO creates effective groups driving innovation, accountability, and outcomes aligned with business goals.

Tailored Agile Operating Model
Developing a customized Agile organizaion design that fits the organization’s unique challenges and opportunities.

Meet our team

Thoughtful, experienced guides—here to help you shape strategy that makes a difference.

Insights on CAO

Aligning the Product, Platform, and Solution Group

Aligning the Product, Platform, and Solution Group by Cesario Ramos. Back in the day (1999), I started working with XP teams. Things were great: cracking out code, writing tests, and doing this super cool thing called continuous integration. Yes, there was even this...

Strategic Alignment: Enhancing Agile Capabilities in Organizations

Making Strategic Tradeoffs with Clarity by Cesario Ramos. Across organizations of all sizes, I hear the same concerns. They are all expressed different but the common theme is: “Won’t embedded specialists be underutilized?" “Isn’t decentralization too costly or...

Designing for What Your Strategy Demands

Designing for What Your Strategy Demands by Cesario Ramos. You might think agility is something you apply uniformly. And if you are working in a large org, you have probably heard someone propose that "we all should have one way of working". A standard way across the...

Agile™: Now Available in 17 New Colours

Agile™: Now Available in 17 New Colours by Cesario Ramos. The Agile community started with a clear goal: to uncover better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Along the way, it was also about helping organizations become more adaptive and...

From Value Dimensions to Organizational Design

From Value Dimensions To Organization Design by Cesario Ramos. New tools, frameworks, and best practices seem to appear every week—and many organizations adopt them without stepping back to ask a simple, but critical question: Does this support the way we compete? At...

Evolving Agile Frameworks

Evolving Agile Frameworks by Cesario Ramos. Change is a natural part of any organization. People move on, technology advances, and new challenges arise. At the same time, markets shift, customer expectations evolve, and competition increases. If your organization...

Stop Fixing Symptoms – Fix Your Organizational Design Instead

Stop Fixing Symptoms – Fix Your Organizational Design Instead by Cesario Ramos. “We have this big specification upfront where we must write all high-level requirements. It takes over 8 months to get it done, and that is their target. Of course, this gives problems...

8 Principles to Creating Agile Organizations

8 Principles to Creating Agile Organizations by Cesario Ramos. Last year in Cascais, at our trainer meetup, we found ourselves diving into an intriguing question: What are the principles of Creating Agile Organizations (CAO)? It’s one of those seemingly simple...

HR’s Role in Agile Success

HR’s Role in Agile Success by Cesario Ramos. Over the years, I’ve had many management conversations about HR policies in Agile setups. Questions like: “How should performance appraisals work in Agile organizations?” “How do we develop multi-skilled people?” “How do we...

Requirement Areas vs. Value Areas: Different Perspectives, Both Essential

Requirement Areas vs. Value Areas: Different Perspectives, Both Essential by Cesario Ramos In organization design, one thing you need to do is evaluate which activities your group needs perform to deliver on its purpose. Based on these activities you can then find the...
CAO book

The CAO book

By Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

Covers agile transformation, systems thinking, organization design guides, team and group design, processes, product definition, and rewards alignment.

Why You Need This Book:

Foundations: Master design, systems thinking, and proven change guidelines.
Practical Tools: Scale agile, launch products, groups, and teams effectively.

    #1
    #1

    Start With Your Strategic Focus: Define the objectives that matter most for your business. Then identify the desired capabilities you believe are needed to deliver on those objectives.

    #2
    #2

    Identify The Capability Gaps: Study your organization to identifiy capability gaps and prioritize the right improvements. This knowledge is crucial to build a foundation for design decisions.

    #3
    #3
    Design Product Groups with Proven Guides: Design your teams into product groups focused on delivering on a purpose and value proposition. Use CAO’s proven organization design guides to drive decisions based on the capability gaps you’ve identified.
    #4
    #4

    Loosely Couple Products Groups to Build Resilience: Design to minimize coupling between product groups so they can act independently. This makes your organization more adaptable, reduces bottlenecks, and builds organizational resilience for whatever comes next.

    #5
    #5

    Launch Your Product Groups in Phases: Gradually transition to your new operational model through phased launches of your product groups. Test the design in practice, learn from real-world results, and adjust as you go.

    #6
    #6

    Measure Capability Development Not Only Outcomes: Track how well your organization closes capability gaps. This ongoing assessment helps maintain your focus on continuous improvement and strategic alignment.

    Strategic Management

    This approach is not just about implementing agile frameworks; it’s about evolving your organizational design to develop the capabilities needed for better strategy execution.

    Keynotes, Panels & Interviews

    Dive into real-world applications of creating agile organizations. Learn from the challenges and triumphs of experts. Access engaging insights on-the-go.

    Evolving Agile Organizations For the Future | Keynote Scrum Gathering 2024

    Evolving Agile Organizations For the Future In this thought-provoking session from the Regional Scrum Gathering Belgrade 2024, Cesario Ramos, a global leader in large-scale transformations, dives into the challenges and opportunities of evolving agile organizations....

    Product Definition Explained in 10 min

    Product Definition!  By Cesario Ramos. The world of Agile product development A critical yet often overlooked aspect is defining your product effectively. A robust product definition goes beyond what’s listed in the catalog—it's the foundation of your organization's...

    Creating Agile Organizations Explained in 5 min

    Cesario Ramos explains the Creating Agile Organizations approach in this short video.Creating Agile Organizations is a systemic approach to designing and coaching agile organizations. It’s based on principles, guidelines, and axioms. Cesario Ramos, founder of CAO and...

    Creating Agile Organizations For LeSS Coaches

    Usefull Differences Between CAO and LeSS To Understand The Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) approach is about creating agile organizations that can easily be adapted, it is not about (de)scaling Agile and it is not the same as LeSS. I love LeSS, it is a great...

    A Discussion about Agile Organizational Design

    Host Dave West of Scrum.org interviews the authors of the book, Creating Agile Organizations, A Systemic Approach, Cesario Ramos and Ilia Pavlichenko. They chat about their motivation behind the book, problems with traditional organizational...

    Interview with Cesario Ramos by John Coleman

    Cesario Ramos on Creating Agile Organizations What is a Product? Where do former Product Owners go? And Dealing With Dependencies. https://youtu.be/tjYJaNyM4bk

    Adaptivity Podcast with Cesario Ramos: Creating Agile Organizations

    Adaptivity Podcast with Cesario Ramos: Creating Agile Organizations We talked about the following topics key impediments to adaptivity defining product groups dependencies between groups commodity platforms launching product groups...

    Agile Uprising Podcast with Cesario Ramos organizational design

    Agile Uprising Podcast with Cesario Ramos organizational design Podcast about the importance of organizational design and how it directly impacts the odds of success when trying to perform any type of large-scale organizational change, especially an agile...

    LeSS Conference Talk – The 3 critical Agile Organization Design Guidelines

    LeSS Conference Talks - The 3 critical Agile Organization Design Guidelines Cesario talks about the 3 critical Agile Organization Design Guidelines at the LeSS conference. https://youtu.be/eLky6gryje0

    Video – How to Create an Agile Organization

    Video - How to Create an Agile Organization Creating agile organizations is hard work, requires patience, humour, and long-term commitment. It can take many years to simplify your organization and discover how to make agility work in your organization. But once you...

    12 Organization Design Guides

    Principles of CAO

    Context-Driven Approach
    Tailor organizational design to your unique context and strategic goals.
    Capability Driven Design
    Identify and address critical capability gaps to align with and achieve strategic objectives.
    Design Product Groups Around Value Creation
    Organize groups around delivering goods and services to maximize customer value and impact.
    Loosely Coupled Product Groups For Resilience
    Enable group independence to boost resilience and support strategic contributions.
    Use Shared Services for Support and Standards
    Provide support and enforce standards without embedding critical units of product groups.
    Optimize for System-Wide Performance
    Prioritize overall system performance, even if it requires compromising individual unit efficiency.
    Design For Adaptability
    Minimize workflow delays, transaction costs, and switching costs to enhance adaptability.
    Design for Emergent Coordination
    Improve collaboration and decision-making by minimizing large meetings, promoting focused, purposeful discussions.

    Learn more

    Discover more about the CAO approach! Explore key CAO concepts and see how they are applied in practice.

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