Align Your Operating Model With Your Strategy

welcome to Creating Agile organizations

Aligning organization design with strategy is the key to building an effective, high-performing business.

Design For Strategic Agility

Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) is a systemic approach that aligns organizational design with business strategy. By leveraging proven principles, guides, and agile capabilities, CAO enables companies to evole their tailored operating model for seamless strategy execution.

 

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Certified Training

Elevate your skills and drive meaningful change in your organization.

Our courses are built on decades of hands-on experience and draw directly from the insights from the book Creating Agile Organizations, providing practical, field-tested strategies for real-world application.

With CAO, organizations can enhance agility, improve adaptability, and ensure their design supports long-term strategic success.

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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

 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.

Who’s Taken the Courses?

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

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.

    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...

    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.

    Mockup CAO guide

    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!  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...

    The creating agile organizations ARTICLES

    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...

    5 𝐄𝐚𝐬𝐲 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐠𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬

    5 𝐄𝐚𝐬𝐲 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐩𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐠𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 by Cesario Ramos. Many people seem to like a good “5 easy steps” format, so let me use this format for something that’s not so simple: Creating Agile Organizations (CAO). As you might know, CAO is not about frameworks or...

    Outcomes Are Overrated: Build Capabilities That Deliver Every Time

    Outcomes Are the Result—Capabilities Are the Key by Cesario Ramos. It seems that at Toyota they say, “Improve 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....

    BENEFITS OF CAO

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

    #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.

    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.

    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.

    Learn more

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

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