Align Your Operating Model With Your Strategy

welcome to Creating Agile organizations

Helping business align organization design with strategy.

Poor execution and inefficiency holding you back? Align strategy and design with a proven systemic approach.

What Is The CAO Approach?

Watch the 3 min video of the CAO approach by Cesario Ramos.

Benefits of CAO

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

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

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

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

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 CompanyΒ 

Applying CAO Guidelines at a Big German Insurance CompanyΒ  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...

The CAO approach

Evolve Your Agile Operating Model

The Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) approach, aligns organization design with strategy using proven guides, principles, and agile capabilities for better strategy execution.

 

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#1

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

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#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.

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#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.
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#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.

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#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.

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#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.

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. Join us in redefining agility for business success.

Learn more with Our Webinar Series

Discover how CAO can transform your organization and help you create the future you envision. Don’t miss this opportunityβ€”reserve your spot today!

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 key 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 components of product groups.
Optimize for System-Wide Performance
Prioritize overall system performance, even if it requires compromising individual component efficiency.
Design For Adaptability
Minimize workflow delays, transaction costs, and switching costs to enhance adaptability.
Design for Emergent Coordination
Minimize large meetings, enable focused, purposeful discussions.

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

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Designing Agile Organizations

Who Should Attend?

Leaders that design for strategic agility.

This 2-day course offers design and thinking tools to create Agile organizations aligned with strategy.

Guiding Agile Organizations course

Guiding Agile Organizations

Β Who Should Attend?

Change leads that support an agile transformation effort.

This 3-day workshop offer tools and coaching skills for Agile transformations: product, structure, processes, and people.

OUR COURSE Β SCHEDULE

Who’s Taken the Courses?

Explore the list of professionals who trust us to guide their Agile improvements.

The CAO guide

Navigating agile organization design with the free CAO guide.

Transform your organization: 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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CAO book

The CAO book

By Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

Creating Agile Organizations scales agility from teams to the entire organization.

Why You Need This Book:

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

    Get Your Copy Today:

    Watch the two-minute overview of the book:

    Learn more

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

    Conference talks & 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!Β  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 catalogβ€”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...

    The creating agile organizations ARTICLES

    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: β€œHow should performance appraisals work in Agile organizations?” β€œHow do we develop multi-skilled people?” β€œHow do we...

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

    Requirement Areas vs. Value Areas: Different Perspectives, Both Essential 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 parts (roles,...

    5 π„πšπ¬π² π’π­πžπ©π¬ 𝐭𝐨 π‚π«πžπšπ­π’π§π  𝐀𝐠𝐒π₯𝐞 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐒𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐒𝐨𝐧𝐬

    5 π„πšπ¬π² π’π­πžπ©π¬ 𝐭𝐨 π‚π«πžπšπ­π’π§π  𝐀𝐠𝐒π₯𝐞 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐒𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐒𝐨𝐧𝐬 by Cesario Ramos. Many people seem to like a good β€œ5 easy steps” format, so let me use this format for something that’s not so simple: Creating Agile Organizations (CAO).Β As you might know, CAO is not about frameworks or...

    Outcomes Are Overrated: Build Capabilities That Deliver Every Time

    Outcomes Are the Resultβ€”Capabilities Are the Key by Cesario Ramos. It seems that at Toyota they say, β€œImprove for improvement’s sake.” The many books on Toyota TPS tell us they don’t focus on quick fixes or chasing short-term goals. Instead, they build systems and...

    Agile Promises improvements, But Why Do We Keep Adding People?

    Agile Promises improvements, But Why Do We Keep Adding People? by Cesario Ramos. An executive recently posed a thought-provoking question:"We’ve been practicing Agile for seven years. It’s supposed to bring improvements, right? But we keep adding people. Where are the...

    Mastering Agile Evolution | Strategic Agility Ahead

    Mastering Agile Evolution In this session, Jurgen de Smet, dives into the challenges and opportunities of designing organizations for strategic agility..

    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....

    Capability-Driven Transformation: The Key to Sustainable Agility

    Capability-Driven Transformation: The Key to Sustainable Agility By Cesario Ramos. A key difference between Toyota and many other companies is how they develop their organizational capabilities over time. As the graph shows, Toyota's approach leads to steady, ongoing...

    The Real Question We Should Be Asking About Agile Transformation

    The Real Question We Should Be Asking About Agile Transformation By Cesario Ramos. The Real Question We Should Be Asking About Agile Transformation From 2022 to 2024, Digital Transformation (DT) spending in Western markets is projected to reach a staggering $6.3...

    How Frequency and Type of Dependencies Shape Your Team Structure

    How Frequency and Type of Dependencies Shape Your Team Structure By Cesario Ramos.Β   The way work flows through your teamsβ€”especially when it comes to dependenciesβ€”plays a important role in determining whether product-focused teams or specialist teams will work...

    Looking for an in-company course?

    We offer DAO and CAO courses in most parts of the world. Contact us without obligation if you would like to organise a professional workshop in your company, either in-person or online.

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