What's a fluid framework?

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Fluid Frameworks was founded to give growing and established businesses access to the right level of guidance, advice and assistance to achieve effective control of their ever-evolving operations.

Frameworks are essential for collaboration at scale. Done the right way, they empower leaders and unleash creativity across a workforce in pursuit of a common goal.  Done the wrong way, they create huge inefficiencies, overheads and distance between decision-makers and activities.  Getting the right framework in-place is therefore critical.

Fluid Frameworks are designed and implemented to learn and adjust as they operate. They incorporate Waterfall and Agile delivery methods, service operations, modern engineering practices, flexible organisation structures and various funding models to create a competitive advantage.

Julian Deasley - Director

Having spent a career working with rapidly growing and large companies to streamline and optimise their businesses, I have observed several common challenges which confront all companies as they reach a certain scale.

These challenges are driven by 3 key themes:

1. Successful companies typically start with a small group of highly engaged and highly invested individuals tightly aligned around a clear and definite objective. As success leads to growth the thought leaders become further removed from front-line operations and the number of people requiring alignment forces the introduction of management layers. Objectives become subject to multiple interpretations, and the individuals interacting with customers become less personally invested in the company’s success. 
2. With increasing business volumes, the technology systems created to support the initial state often struggle to scale. With the recent success of cloud hosting services this barrier is easier to avoid for new start-ups, but the majority of incumbent companies are burdened by some unscalable architecture, often at the core of their business model. ERP systems are introduced to help manage the company, often without direct links to operations (eg stand-alone timesheeting systems), adding further complexity and overhead to the business model.
3. In order to operate consistently at scale, a common process model is required. However, as companies grow, processes are often defined bottom-up, creating inconsistencies and challenges in collaboration across the business. The problem is often exacerbated as ‘projects’ and ‘enhancements’ deliver changes to the ways of working, adding new variants to an already complex collection of processes.

Faced with this situation, leaders rely increasingly on governance structures to control activity and meet their obligations to external stakeholders. In the absence of a consistent process model and a well-integrated ERP system, governance becomes heavily reliant on management layer reporting and the occasional audit. It is possible that this is effective, but in 25 years I have never observed such reporting delivered without at least some ‘messaging’ having been applied. Over time, this tends to undermine confidence as budgets blow out and deadlines and forecasts are missed with little warning.

The one truly fungible measure across any business is dollars, so unless you can create reliable alternatives, the Finance function will take over. The issue here is that Finance functions in companies are focussed primarily on cost (and in many cases, benefits, but they are often projections and hard to measure in $, so…..). An IT support team that runs 2 people short and as a result fails to apply security patches is considered well-run on finance metrics (at least for as long as a breach does not occur). Similarly, a project that delivers 10% of its original scope, but hits its budget may well be celebrated as a success.

Leaders of large companies are left with little real control of their businesses. Strategies are brainstormed, workshopped and beautifully documented in slide decks to be presented to the workforce for delivery, typically once a year. For the next 11 months, decision makers rely on ‘status updates’, ‘RAG’ ratings and budget actuals before reaching a moment of reckoning as the annual results are prepared. Planning is hampered by the absence of an accurate picture of where the business is, and opportunities requiring a reassignment of resources are routinely missed.

If this sounds like a reasonably accurate description of your experience, do not despair – there are ways of getting you closer to the action in your company, and to better-equip you to lead, all whilst creating clarity for your workforce and opportunities for synergies. 

Fluid Frameworks works with leadership, operational and execution teams to connect strategy to execution and change initiation to operations by creating dynamic frameworks that use and interconnect elements from proven methodologies based on the specific needs of the company. This invariably requires strong sponsorship and some changes in ways of working but can often be achieved rapidly and without significant investment in new tooling.

The result is a clear and accurate view of the current state and planned next steps of each level of the organisation which is used to make decisions that are immediately visible to all. Accountability is clear for each person and where priorities clash, trade-offs are transparent and driven by leadership, enabling performance measurement and incentives to be accurately aligned to the company’s goals. The company is able to redirect resources rapidly to emerging opportunities, achieving in practice the elusive goal of customer-centricity.

The irreplaceable contribution of humans to any company is creativity – removing choices about the ‘how’ directs that creativity towards the ‘what’.  The right structure, balancing control and team autonomy, will free all of your people to do their best work.