Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
5 to work through
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advanced
A 900-person engineering organisation funds work as 9-month projects. A project receives a budget and a team drawn from a resourcing pool; both dissolve at go-live. Run costs land on a central operations group of 30 people who support about 140 services. The CTO wants durable product teams that own their services in production. Sequence this change over four quarters without stopping delivery.
3 min answer -
advanced
A logistics marketplace expanding city by city must decide what is centralised and what is local. How should that be structured?
2 min answer -
advanced
A super-app spans messaging, payments, mini-programs and social features. What operating model supports it, and what does the architecture require in return?
2 min answer -
advanced
An organisation centralises all schema changes through one data team of four, serving fourteen product teams. The arrangement is defended as efficient. What is gained, what is paid, and when does the bill arrive?
2 min answer -
advanced
An organisation with functional teams — development, QA, operations, database — wants to adopt microservices. What do you tell them?
2 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Fundable Boundary
A service boundary that sits inside one budget line and one approver - the condition under which it survives contact with the organisation rather tha…
conceptOperating Model
How an organisation arranges people, process, technology and governance to deliver its capabilities, which constrains architecture as strongly as any…
conceptOperating Models
How an organisation arranges people, ownership and decision rights to deliver and run systems — which determines what architectures are viable.
conceptShared-Team Queue
The queueing behaviour of any central team that must approve or perform work for many others, where waiting time rises sharply as utilisation approac…
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.