Case Studies
Case Study 1
Operating model for an $800M global client portfolio
Operating model design and launch for a new multinational client group within a global professional services firm delivered 50% client revenue growth in two years.
The situation
A global professional services firm was generating over $800M in annual revenue from multinational corporations. But that revenue was being managed as thousands of separate local relationships rather than as a coherent global portfolio. Each country managed its own client relationships, its own delivery, and its own commercial agreements. Where global agreements existed, they were largely umbrellas for locally negotiated work. The firm had no systematic picture of what it was delivering to its most complex clients across geographies, no coordinated approach to growing those relationships, and no operating model capable of serving multinational clients in the way they actually needed to be served.
The strategic opportunity was significant. Multinational clients had needs that the existing regional structure couldn't meet: global consistency, coordinated delivery across 40+ countries, and commercial relationships that reflected the full scope of the firm's value rather than a series of disconnected local engagements. Capturing that opportunity meant building something new. But the existing $800M was already being generated through approximately 10,000 line of business consultants who would continue to own local delivery. Any new operating model had to work for them as much as for the 300 consultants moving into the new business unit.
The risk wasn't whether to proceed. It was designing the infrastructure carefully enough that the new model enhanced local delivery rather than disrupting it, and created genuine global value rather than just adding a coordination layer on top of what already existed.
The structural problems
The operating model had to resolve several tensions simultanously.
Global account management and local delivery had to coexist without conflict. The business unit's 300 consultants would own multinational client relationships at the global level, but the actual delivery of work would continue to flow through the firm's 10,000 line of business consultants in local markets. Decision rights, revenue attribution, and accountability had to be clear enough that both populations understood their role and had a genuine incentive to make the model work.
The commercial framework had to reflect the reality of how multinational clients bought services: sometimes globally coordinated, sometimes locally managed, often both simultaneously. Pricing, contracting, and revenue recognition all had to be redesigned for that complexity without creating the kind of internal disputes over credit and accountability that undermine matrix structures from the inside.
Regional response to the new model was mixed and varied significantly by geography. Some regions engaged constructively from the outset. Others were cautious about a global layer that might redistribute relationships and revenue they had built. The operating model had to address that tension structurally, not just through communication.
And partway through, a key acquisition was integrated into the business unit, adding further complexity to an operating model that was still being established.
The approach
I led the work from business case through operational implementation, partnering with the EVP who became the business unit's first leader.
The business case was developed and presented jointly to the Executive Committee, establishing the strategic rationale, market opportunity, investment requirements, and five-year financial projections clearly enough to secure approval and resources. The commitment sought wasn't just funding. It was executive alignment on a specific operating model, a specific commercial framework, and specific performance targets.
The operating model was designed before anything was built. The core architectural questions were resolved first: how global account ownership and regional delivery would coexist, where decision rights sat at each stage of the client relationship, how revenue would be attributed across global and local teams, and how the 10,000 line of business consultants outside the business unit would need to work differently. Change management for the broader population was designed as part of the operating model, not as an afterthought.
The five-year strategic plan was developed in partnership with the full leadership team, establishing the KPIs, performance management frameworks, and operating rhythms needed to run the business unit with discipline from the start.
Operational implementation covered the full infrastructure: a global programme management office, a Warsaw-based team handling delivery of standardised client stewardship reports and research to global client managers, monthly forecasting and annual budgeting in partnership with the Finance business partner, CRM and reporting systems providing visibility into pipeline, revenue, and profitabiity across the global portfolio, and a team of project managers allocated across regions partnering with regional leadership on delivery. Commercial development ran in parallel, including white space analyses and client engagement plans developed with the business unit's commercialisation leader. The acquisition was integrated into the business unit's operating model and service portfolio as the infrastructure was being established.
What changed
Revenue from the multinational client portfolio grew 50% in the first two years of operation, through a combination of expanded relationships with existing clients across both geography and lines of business, and inorganic growth through the acquisition.
The more significant outcome was structural. The firm moved from managing $800M of multinational revenue as thousands of disconnected local relationships to managing it as a coherent global portfolio with the infrastructure to grow it intentionally. But the metric that best captures the complexity of what that required isn't the revenue growth. It's the scale of the change management challenge underneath it.
The 300 consultants who moved into the business unit were the visible part of the transformation. The harder design problem was the 10,000 line of business consultants outside it who continued to own local delivery but had to work differently to make the global model function. They hadn't asked for a new operating model. In some regions they had actively resisted one. The operating model had to give them a genuine stake in the outcome rather than just a new set of requirements, and the change management approach had to vary significantly by region to reflect genuinely different starting points across the firm's global footprint.
Getting that right was what determined whether the commercial framework delivered its promise or simply created a new layer of internal friction on top of the existing structure.
Case Study 2
Transformation Across 200+ Countries
Operating model transformation for a global fintech cut product roadmap timing by 50% for region and market strategic priorities and standardised commercialisation requirements.
The situation
A global fintech had the market presence and the strategic ambition to deliver products across more than 200 countries. What it lacked was the execution infrastructure to do so reliably. Products were late to market. Regulatory programmes were managed through heroic individual effort. Prioritisation was reactive. The organisation was carrying the full operational complexity of a global fintech that has both platforms and individual produts without an operating model designed to support it.
The problems looked, on the surface, like coordination failures and process inefficiencies. The diagnostic told a different story. The infrastructure itself had never been designed for the scale and complexity the business was now operating at. It had grown organically, and the accumulated weight of that growth was visible throughout.
The structural problems
Three interconnected pattern failures were driving most of the damage.
The global-local disconnect was real and deeply embedded. Global teams made product and architecture decisions without adequate input from regional markets. Regional teams, meanwhile, were developing their own solutions without always having the technical and architectural expertise to find the right ones. The result was misalignment in both directions: global strategy that didn't reflect regional reality, and regional execution that didn't always reflect sound technical thinking. There was no reliable mechanism connecting the two, and no shared forum in which the tension could be resolved productively.
The cross-functional breakdown was equally significant, and in some respects more structurally damaging. Functions across the product development lifecycle were not operating with their own fit-for-purpose processes. Some were borrowing processes designed for other functions, using them as substitutes for infrastructure they didn't have. The cumulative effect was end-to-end workflows that were bloated, repetitive, and manual-intensive. Friction was embedded throughout the prioritisation, solution design, and commercialisation phases. Across more than 48 interdependent workflows, the organisation was carrying far more process weight than the work actually required.
The third failure was invisible work. With no systematic visibility into cross-regional demand and dependencies, leadership had a reliable picture of roughly 30% of what was actually in motion across the organisation. Prioritisation and resource decisions were made on incomplete information, and blockers were discovered late.
The approach
The work required a diagnosis: an investigation into which structural failures were present, how they connected to each other, and what needed to change at the infrastructure level before any change could hold.
The global-local operating model was redesigned to resolve the disconnect in both directions. This meant building governance forums and planning cadences that created genuine two-way connection between global and regional teams, integrating regional product leadership into quarterly planning and OKR processes, and establishing the tooling and cultural change needed to make the new model stick. Decision rights were defined across product, technology, commercial, and risk functions, so that authority was clear and the right expertise was shaping decisions at each stage.
A commercial launch readiness system was designed and implemented to address the downstream execution failures: products reaching market without proper pricing, support, or sales enablement in place.
The cross-functional process work was tackled as a diagnostic and design exercise. A comprehensive end-to-end analysis of more than 48 interdependent processes identified where the weight, repetition, and manual effort were concentrated, what was driving them structurally, and what a leaner, better-designed set of workflows would look like. This produced a detailed optimisation roadmap with clear sequencing, prioritisation by business impact and risk reduction, and recommendations for automation and AI-enabled improvements where appropriate.
What changed
The work produced two distinct types of outcome.
The global-local operating model redesign was implemented. Cross-regional visibility went from approximately 30% to complete. Decision-making speed for regional initiatives improved by 50%. Five regions, previously operating with entirely different approaches, were brought under a consistent operating model. The governance, tooling, and cultural change needed to sustain it were in place before the engagement concluded. The scale of what had previously been managed without proper infrastructure was clear in the programmes running at the time: a Turkish market entry requiring coordinated execution across global and regional teams, and regulatory compliance activation across Europe, both of which had been navigated through individual effort rather than systematic execution.
The cross-functional process optimisation work was completed as a diagnostic and design deliverable. The organisation received a comprehensive analysis of where the 48+ processes were failing, a roadmap for redesign, and clear documentation. Implementation of that roadmap was a subsequent phase of work.
Case Study 3
Commercial Operating Model Redesign Aligning Sales and Revenue
Transformation for a global professional services firm operating across 40+ countries aligned sales figures with recogised P&L revenue for the first time, improving forecast accuracy from 30% to 85%.
The situation
A global professional services firm had a problem that leadership could see clearly but couldn't explain. Sales targets were being hit every year. Revenue targets were being missed. The two should have been connected. Nobody could demonstrate whether they were or not, or why the gap existed.
The firm had no mechanism for connecting sales activity to realised revenue. The CRM where sales were recorded wasn't linked to the revenue recognition system. There was nothing that traced a sale through to the revenue it eventually generated, or showed whether and when it came through. Without that connection, the gap between sales performance and revenue performance was effectively invisible: present every year, structurally inexplicable, and impossible to manage.
Underneath that was a deeper data integrity problem. Revenue was tracked through project codes that consultants were routinely reusing rather than setting up new ones, because it was easier. The cumulative effect was a revenue dataset that couldn't answer basic commercial questions. It was impossible to distinguish recurring revenue from new work, new projects from expansions of existing ones, current year sales from carry-forward from prior years, or partially delivered engagements with future revenue still to come. The data architecture that should have connected strategy to execution had been quietly compromised by thousands of individually rational shortcuts, and nobody had a complete picture of the damage until the diagnostic was done.
The CFO sponsored the transformation because commercial planning, budgeting, and investment decisions were all being made on numbers that couldn't be trusted.
The structural problems
Three pattern failures were operating simultaneously and reinforcing each other.
The most fundamental was invisible work throughout the revenue lifecycle. With no link between the sales system and the revenue system, the journey from opportunity through proposal, contract, delivery, and recognition was opaque end to end. Leaders had approximately 30% visibility into the client lifecycle. The other 70% was either unknown or only discoverable through manual reconstruction that was itself unreliable given the project code problem.
The data architecture failure made the invisible work problem structural rather than incidental. The project code governance breakdown meant that even the revenue data that existed couldn't be interpreted reliably. Recurring revenue, new business, expansions, carry-forwards, and future revenue from current year sales were all mixed together in ways that made meaningful analysis nearly impossible. There was no shared taxonomy, no data governance framework, and no single source of truth that connected commercial activity to financial outcomes.
The misaligned incentives compounded both. Sales targets and revenue targets were set as if they were connected, but the operating model provided no mechanism for testing whether they were. Quota allocation and target setting were effectively based on intuition, because the data needed to connect them reliably to revenue outcomes didn't exist in a usable form. Consultants were being measured against targets that the firm couldn't verify were achievable or coherent. Leaders were managing commercial performance without the information needed to do it.
The approach
I led the transformation end to end, from diagnosis through global rollout across 40+ countries.
The diagnostic established the full picture of where the operating model was failing: where the breaks in the revenue lifecycle sat, what the project code problem had done to data integrity, and what would need to be true at the infrastructure level before any reporting or planning improvement could hold.
The data foundations were addressed first, because nothing else could work without them. This meant establishing a shared taxonomy and governance framework for how revenue was categorised and tracked: clear definitions for recurring revenue, new business, expansions, carry-forwards, and future revenue from current year sales, with the governance controls needed to maintain data integrity going forward. The project setup process was reviewed, simplified, and redesigned so that doing the right thing was easier than the shortcuts that had caused the problem. Governance without that change would have produced compliance on paper and workarounds in practice. The process redesign was what made the governance sustainable.
The CRM and revenue recognition system were integrated to create the link that had never existed: a traceable connection between a sale and the revenue it generated, with automated data flows that made the journey from opportunity through recognition visible for the first time. This was extended to include pipeline, sales, revenue, and profitability in a single enterprise reporting framework accessible to both client-facing consultants and leaders, giving each population the view of commercial performance relevant to their role.
What changed
Visibility across the client lifecycle went from approximately 30% to 85%
The more significant outcome was that the firm could answer the question it had never been able to answer before: whether sales performance and revenue performance were connected, and why they diverged when they did. Leaders had commercial reporting they trusted enough to make investment and planning decisions from. Client-facing consultants had visibility into pipeline and revenue that allowed them to manage their own commercial performance rather than operating blind.
The transformation is a specific illustration of a broader principle. When commercial performance looks inexplicable, the instinct is to question the people or the strategy. The more productive question is whether the operating model has the infrastructure to make the connection between activity and outcome visible at all. In this case, it didn't. Building that infrastructure was what made everything else manageable.