Case study
Transforming how more than eleven thousand people worked by centralising into a centre of excellence, and taking just over nineteen million pounds out of quarterly cost.
A global energy business wanted to change the way a very large part of its organisation worked. Capability was spread thinly across the business, the same work was being done many times over in different places, and the cost of that duplication was significant and recurring. The aim was to bring the work together into a centre of excellence, with more than eleven thousand people affected, without losing knowledge, breaking service or triggering the resistance that a change of that size usually attracts. Centralisation on that scale is as much a people and change problem as a structural one, and it only delivers if the new model actually works for the people inside it.
Our team led the transformation into a centre of excellence, treating the people change as seriously as the structure.
The work was centralised into a functioning centre of excellence, and just over nineteen million pounds of cost was taken out on a quarterly basis. More than eleven thousand people moved to a new way of working that held, because the model had been designed around them rather than imposed on them.
Centralising work across eleven thousand people is where most operating model changes fail, not on the design but on the adoption. Delivering the saving and making the new model stick at that scale is proof that we treat the people change as the real work, which is exactly why it lands.
An operating model only delivers if people actually adopt it. We design for that from the start, and we have done it at the scale of eleven thousand people.