Target Operating Model Workshop

Make your Operating Model actually useful by applying the thinking behind Comic Agilé

When organisations pay expensive external consultants to help them create a Target Operating Model, they often end up with an extensive PowerPoint presentation that covers all imaginable and unimaginable aspects of how to run your business. It looks good, and the level of details is high (only the number of slides is higher). 

After the consultants have handed over their divine delivery and moved on to the next victims looking for a useless Target Operating Model, you look into the consultants’ work and realise that the PowerPoint slides are so far from reality that their content cannot be implemented. Having learned the concept of “sunk cost”, you accept that the money is gone for ever, and find a poor middle manager who you force to recreate a new and actually useful Operating Model (“because it’s good for your career”).

So, you then actually end up with a potentially useful Target Operating Model, but we all know that it has been produced in an Ivory Tower by the lonely soul (any claims that they have involved others are definitely false). Your task is now to involve the rest of the organisation and, in particular, the agile teams who will be living and breathing the Target Operation Model. These innocent, but knowledgable people can also spot the shortcomings and risks in it, while also having the experience and creativity to mitigate the risks. 

Therefore, you bring them to this workshop, which facilitates that the participants learn to use the humor of Comic Agilé to spot, articulate and mitigate the risks of implementing an Target Operating Model.

Results of the workshop:

  • Each table group of 4-5 people have created their own Comic Agilé comic strip that articulates a risk in implementing your Operating Model / Ways of Working.
  • Participants have learned to find the holes in the cheese by identifying the potential antipatterns of their organizations.
  • Participants have identified concrete ways of mitigating the risks in order to successfully implement the Operating Model.
  • Participants will have a sense of ownership of the Operating Model.
  • Participants will have learned to convey a complex risk in a simple format. 
  • Having fun while learning and creating (no drawing skills needed!).

Workshop Disposition

  1. Luxshan presents examples of concrete risks, misunderstandings, conflicts and antipatterns presented humorously through the Comic Agilé format for entertainment, inspiration and learning.
  2. In groups, the participants pick a part of the Operating Model, and identify, break down and articulate, as a simple comic strip, the risks that they see in the Operating Model as it is today. 
  3. In groups, the participants brainstorm realistic and immediately implementable ways of mitigating the articulated risks.
  4. All groups present their risk and mitigation to the others.

Target participants

Team members of agile teams, agile practitioners, Line Management and others who claim to work with complex development efforts in an agile context.

About the workshop facilitator

Luxshan Ratnaravi, M.Sc. in Software Engineering, works as an independent agile consultant and uses humor to identify what really happens when agile meets reality, and how to fix it. He has articulated and visualised more than 280 antipatterns through Comic Agilé together with his business parter, Mikkel. Through his 14 years in the agile space, he’s held roles as Product Owner, Release Train Engineer and Agile Coach in organisations such as Topdanmark, PFA, Vestas and Bankdata.

Practical Information

Language: English or Danish — Duration: 2 hours
Max no. of participants per workshop: 10 teams of 4-5 people.
Price ex. VAT: Contact us.