More than ever, companies are facing numerous complex challenges. These range from the pressure to innovate from new competitors to insufficient speed of action and decision-making, in which the ability to adapt quickly to changes is important. The lack of alignment between the specialist departments and IT often makes it difficult to react quickly to changes and too many internal dependencies, which slow down agile, market-driven developments, are also key problems.

Although agile methods and concepts offer solutions, implementing and integrating them into existing company structures is often anything but trivial. Existing agile frameworks tend to prescribe standardised methods, which leaves little room for the consideration of specific framework conditions. Our approach with the mgm Flow Model aims to develop customised solutions for your challenges. By taking a holistic view, we avoid isolated solutions and navigate specifically between the need for controllability and speed of response. This supports our vision of effective business agility in order to make companies fit for the future.

Our understanding of business agility

We understand business agility as the ability of a company to react quickly and efficiently to changes in the market environment by adapting internal processes and the coordination of value chains and setting priorities in line with the objectives set.

By integrating customer needs into the entire value chain and strategically linking different work levels, we enable a targeted response to market changes. Effective collaboration between IT and specialist departments improves the transparency of all initiatives and projects “in progress” and can increase the speed of implementation through prioritisation. The implementation of agile metrics and feedback loops are further key factors.

From flight levels to the flow model

Klaus Leopold’s Flight Levels approach was developed to improve coordination and communication in companies. Based on flight levels, flight levels are a model for structuring information flows, work processes and decisions in companies at three different levels

• Flight Level 3 (strategy): The top level comprises the strategic direction and management of the organisation. This is where overarching decisions are made to define the vision, goals and framework conditions to guide the work at the lower levels.
• Flight Level 2 (Coordination): At this level, the focus is on optimising coordination between different teams and areas throughout the company’s value stream. The aim here is to ensure that teams work together effectively, share information and remove obstacles to support the work at Flight Level 1.
• Flight Level 1 (work processes): At this level, teams work on specific tasks and are responsible for operational implementation. They make decisions that are directly related to their work. Improvements at this level are limited locally and often offer little optimisation for the entire value stream of the organisation.

As part of our consulting practice, we know that this is a suitable approach for working with organisations to identify the effective levers for improvement. In the flow model, we have expanded the flight levels by two additional perspectives and specifically include customer requirements and market developments in the analysis, as well as product utilisation and customer satisfaction. In this way, we support the customer-orientation of companies and the focus on results.

The five levels of the flow model for effective business agility

Our flow model is a customised approach to achieving the respective goals and considers solution approaches and optimisation potential for the specific challenges in the value creation process at each level. The effect is achieved through improved coordination of the different levels and thus ensures strategic capability.

• Needs: Based on market developments and customer requirements, the basis for a customer-centred approach is created at this level. The aim is to understand where and how impulses from the market and technological potential are channelled into the company and how they are incorporated into the corporate or product vision. The aim is to further develop the company’s business capabilities.
• Strategy: At the strategic level, the focus is on questions to support the defined goals. Questions about suitable degrees of freedom and guidelines are addressed in order to shape the strategic room for manoeuvre. The aim is to use the strategic goals and roadmaps to prioritise the initiatives for the work at the coordination level and thus enable a clear focus.
• Coordination: The coordination level deals with the challenge of effectively organising the relationship between strategic and non-strategic work. The focus here is on how upstream and downstream processes can be integrated, how dependencies are identified and managed and how feedback flows into the coordination process.
• Implementation: This operational level of the flow model deals with the concrete implementation of tasks. Questions about the optimal team composition and dealing with bottleneck resources are the focus in order to optimise work flows.
• Benefit: With the delivery or use of the products, acceptance takes centre stage. The aim is to ensure that customers are satisfied and that their feedback is incorporated back into the company. Feedback to the other levels ensures that the company is customer-orientated.

The right consulting for your needs

Our consulting team works closely with you to develop a customised approach and suitable implementation. We ensure that your employees acquire the necessary skills and understanding to successfully overcome the challenges. Our consulting approach is characterised by the following features:

• Individual: The flow model is customised to your specific challenges with you. This includes developing your own vision of business agility and the specific way to achieve it.
• Compatible: The flow model enables transformation to the framework conditions of your organisation. It integrates seamlessly into existing methods and tools.
• Value-orientated: The focus is on value creation and the needs aligned with it. Collaboration and alignment take centre stage and bottlenecks are effectively eliminated.
• Low-threshold: No extensive organisational restructuring is required. By focussing on the flow of information, scaling can also be achieved for delimited areas.
• Tried and tested: The flow model is based on the experience gained from numerous transformation projects with customers from a wide range of industries. It benefits from the combined project experience of mgm consulting partners.

Conclusion

With the flow model, we offer you a holistic and customisable approach to the challenges of modern business environments. The detailed focus on value creation and the individual needs of our customers, combined with a tried and tested methodology, makes our offer unique. If your organisation is facing the challenge of becoming more agile while ensuring a clear customer and value creation focus, our flow model is the answer.