The organisation had a structure. It had job titles, reporting lines and a broadly understood sense of who did what. What it did not have was precision — and in defence delivery, imprecision at the boundaries between roles costs time, creates risk, and produces exactly the kind of accountability gaps that make programmes slip.
The specific pattern: work was arriving at handoff points between teams without a clear owner on the other side. Roles overlapped in some areas — two people each believing a task was the other's — and were absent in others. The handoff failures were not dramatic. They were the slow, daily friction of a team operating without a shared, explicit model of how it worked. Emails without clear recipients. Decisions deferred because accountability was disputed. Tasks that fell into the gap between two job descriptions and stayed there.
The context made it harder. The organisation was mid-change — a broader programme was running in the background. Budget was constrained. There was a recruitment freeze in place. The usual response to role clarity problems — hire the missing people, restructure, create new positions — was not available. The operating model had to be designed around the people and resources that existed. Not the ideal state. The achievable state.
"The brief was essentially: fix this without spending money, without changing the headcount, and without disrupting a programme that is already in flight. Eight weeks."
There was also a political dimension that is common in defence environments and worth naming honestly. Role ambiguity is rarely innocent. People defend territory — sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Clarifying who owns what requires someone to sit in the room with people who have competing views of their own accountabilities and facilitate agreement. That is not a documentation exercise. It is a negotiation, and it requires a practitioner who can hold the conversation without taking sides.
The engagement ran in two clear halves. The first four weeks were diagnostic — understanding the existing structure, the actual flows of work, and the precise points at which things were going wrong. The second four weeks were design and agreement — producing the operating model, clarifying roles, mapping handoffs through SIPOC, and getting the organisation to sign off on a single agreed version.
"The SIPOC work in weeks five and six made abstract role descriptions concrete. When you can show someone exactly what arrives at their desk, from whom, in what form, and what they are expected to do with it — disagreement becomes much harder to sustain."
The constraints were genuinely constraining. Designing an operating model with a recruitment freeze means every gap you find has to be resolved by redistributing work that already exists. Some of those redistributions are uncomfortable. People who have been doing things informally — picking up the slack because nobody else did — find that their informal contribution is now formalised into their role. People who have been avoiding certain tasks discover that the new model closes the gap they relied on. Neither conversation is easy.
The mid-change context added a layer of uncertainty that some people used as a reason not to engage. "We're about to change anyway — why are we defining this now?" is a legitimate question that can also function as a way to defer a difficult conversation indefinitely. The answer — because the change is harder to land if you go into it with an operating model that doesn't function — is true but not always welcome.
The political dimension was real. Two roles in particular had overlapping accountabilities in an area both parties considered important. Each believed the overlap was the other person's encroachment into their territory. The SIPOC work was what broke the impasse — not because it resolved the political question, but because it made the operational question so precise that the political framing stopped being useful. The question stopped being "whose area is this?" and became "who is the supplier and who is the customer at this specific handoff?" That question has a definite answer. The political question does not.
"Ambiguity is comfortable until you name it. Once you put a SIPOC on the table and ask who the supplier is for this input, the ambiguity collapses. That's not always a popular moment. But it's the only moment that produces a working model."
A single agreed operating model covering structure, roles and process flows. Not a consultant document — a working reference the team uses.
Every role redefined with explicit accountabilities. Overlaps resolved. Gaps closed within existing headcount. Each person knows what is theirs.
SIPOC-level specification for every key handoff. Supplier, input, process, output, customer — explicit and agreed. No more work falling in the gaps.
The clean exit at week eight was the right outcome for this brief. This was not a transformation. It was a precision intervention — clarity applied to a specific set of problems within a defined scope. The organisation did not need ongoing support. It needed someone to do the work that everyone knew needed doing and that nobody had the bandwidth or the standing to lead internally.
The broader point this engagement illustrates is about scope. Not every CN engagement is an 18-month programme. Some of the most valuable work is fast, focused and bounded. An organisation mid-change, under budget pressure, with a specific friction that is slowing it down does not need a comprehensive transformation programme. It needs the right practitioner for eight weeks with a clear brief and a clean methodology. That is a different proposition from what most consultancies offer — and a significantly more accessible one for organisations that cannot commit to a long engagement.
Long-game capability transfer for complex transformation programmes. Fast, focused, bounded delivery for specific OD problems. The methodology is the same. The scope is calibrated to what the organisation actually needs — not to what fills a consulting contract.