Learn about CAO
Articles, interviews and confernce talks
Our articles and video’s about Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) principles and practices. Below you can find an executive overview of the CAO approach, read about the fundamental elements of the CAO approach, its axioms, principles and guidelines in our case studies. There is also the CAO Guide. This guide helps organisations on their journey towards agile organisational design.
executive overview
Explore how to develop an operating model grounded in the realities of your unique challenges and opportunities.
In collaboration with Scrum.org, Cesario Ramos & Dave West (CEO of Scrum.org) wrote this executive summary to explore key concepts for designing and creating agile organizations using a systems-inspired approach.
Don’t miss out on this essential guide for modern business leaders looking to stay ahead of the curve.
Explore our Case Studies, Articles and Videos
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...
How Frequency and Type of Dependencies Shape Your Team Structure
How Frequency and Type of Dependencies Shape Your Team Structure By Cesario Ramos. The way work flows through your teams—especially when it comes to dependencies—plays a important role in determining whether product-focused teams or...
Agile Organization Design: Moving Beyond Size Logic
Agile Organization Design: Moving Beyond Size Logic by Cesario Ramos. Historically, many companies adhered to the 150-person rule for organizational units, a concept based on "Dunbar's number." This rule suggested that 150 is the cognitive limit to...
Redefining Agility: Evolving Our Operating Model as a Scrum Master
Redefining Agility: Evolving Our Operating Model as a Scrum Master By Cesario Ramos. In our relentless pursuit of excellence and efficiency, Scrum Masters play an important role in guiding organizations through the adoption of agile frameworks....
Don’t confuse Product-Level and Organizational Adaptability in Agile Organizations
Don’t confuse Product-Level and Organizational Adaptability in Agile Organizations By Cesario Ramos. Adaptability is a key component of any successful organization. It's important not to confuse product-level adaptability with organizational...
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...
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,...
Measure Transformation, Not Conformation
Measure Transformation, Not Conformation By Cesario Ramos. The core of agile isn’t conforming to some framework but the ability to adapt, respond, and deliver value efficiently. Hence, when measuring agile transformation, focus on the newly...
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,...
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...
Evolving Your Own Framework
Evolving Your Agile Organizational Framework By Cesario Oliveira Ramos Meet Sara, a driven product director who's always up for a challenge. But with ambitious targets to attract 10,000 new clients, increase customer satisfaction by 35%, and keep...
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...
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
Creating Agile Organizations: Designing Your Path to Agility
Creating Agile Organizations: Designing Your Path to Agility By Cesario Ramos. The Creating Agile Organizations approach is about designing your own organizational framework and coaching its adoption. It is important to note that it is different...
Enabling Multifunctional Learning
Enabling Multifunctional Learning Cross-functional teams are capable of quickly testing hypotheses and adapting to changes in the market. They are the primary block of an Agile organization. Unfortunately, the load on different specializations and...
Building for Agility: The Role of Commodity Platforms
Building for Agility: The Role of Commodity Platforms By Cesario Ramos. One of my clients had a platform called the “Internet channel” that was intended to increase user conversion and usability. The idea was great - the platform was supposed to...
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...
Unlocking Agile Success: Aligning Your Organizational Design with Strategic Focus
Unlocking Agile Success: Aligning Your Organizational Design with Strategic Focus By Cesario Ramos. Agile organizational characteristics are crucial, but they alone won't determine all of your design decisions. You'll still need to tackle typical...
Product Titanics – how modern organizations waste adaptability
Product Titanics - how modern organizations waste adaptability This article is a part of the blog series about the book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko. The Titanic sank on the night of...
Are you familiar with Agile Organization Design?
What is Agile Organization Design? By Cesario Ramos. It's a powerful approach to designing organizations that allows for adaptability to customer demands. According to organizational design expert Jay Galbraith, there are five key components that...
Develop Enterprise Agility With Product Groups
Develop Enterprise Agility With Product Groups Cross-functional team is the basic structural block in Scrum. It is a self-managed unit that optimizes speed of learning and flexibility. When multiple cross-functional teams are working on the same...
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...
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...
Cesario talks about Evolving your own framewok at ScrumDay Barcelona.
Cesario talks about Evolving your own framewok at ScrumDay Barcelona. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdYimuMTh8I
The Critical Agile Organization Design Guideline
The Critical Agile Organization Design Guideline Second blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations – A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko. Many problems at the workplace are not the fault of...
The Critical Agile Organization Change Guidelines
The Critical Agile Organization Change Guidelines Fourth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations – A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko. Resisting change during adoption is a normal human...
What does it mean to be Agile on a large scale?
First, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations – A Systemic Approachby Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko. What does it mean to be Agile on a large scale? According to Craig Larman, a renowned consultant,...
Guiding The Organization in Multi-Skills development
Guiding The Organization in Multi-Skills development The sixth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations – A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko. A successful team works together...
What does Your Team Optimize For?
What does your Team Optimize For? By Cesario Ramos. The canvas below shows four characteristics of development teams. On the y-axis, you can plot the level of cross-domain work your team picks up. It goes from working on a Single Domain (top) to...
Designing the Product Owner Role
Designing the Product Owner Role The eighth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations – A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko. In this blog, a short description of one workshop from...
Creating Agile Organizations Interview with Cesario Ramos
Diego Callizo interviewed Cesario Ramos about his new book. We kept the interview short (20′) and to the point. Here are some of the insights: How can managers benefit from this book?The risk of rolling back #changeThe ratio of organisations...
Creating Agile Organizations
Below is an excerpt from the introduction of the book: Creating Agile Organizations. A Systems Thinking Approach to Creating an Agile Organization Why do people repeat the same unsuccessful behavior in organizations? Why do certain problems...