Consulting Operating Framework

This document describes the organizational model of Agile Lab Consulting services.

It is based on Business Units (customer-focused) and Practice Units (people-focused).

We separate practices into wide and narrow, with the goal of ensuring operational efficiency, technical quality, and coordination between Business Units (BUs), Practice Units (PUs), the Engineering Director, the Engineering Office, and the Consulting Lead.

Foundational Principles

Distinction Between Wide and Narrow Practices

Wide Practices

These are practices with a large number of people, widely distributed across BUs, and relatively easy to allocate.
They generally have more uniform and stable workloads, allowing for direct management at the BU level with minimal need for central coordination.

Typical characteristics:

• high population
• skills widely distributed across the company
• limited variability in required seniority
• easier to staff and manage turnover

Narrow Practices

These are practices with specialized, or critical competencies, scarce availability of resources and often with variable or intensive workloads.
They require strong governance, planning, and capacity control.

Typical characteristics:

• limited or hard-to-find talents
• high variability in technical skill requirements
• elevated risk of conflicts between BUs
• strong impact on technical quality and project success

Goals of the Model

• Autonomy and speed for mature, widely distributed practices (wide).
• Quality, supervision, and optimal utilization for specialist practices (narrow).
• Unified technical governance to avoid divergent methodologies.
• Clear, repeatable decision processes for allocation, capacity, and business priorities.
• Flexible structure to support practice evolution over time.

Roles and Responsibilities

Consulting Lead

The Consulting Lead ensures strategic and business alignment across all BUs.

Key responsibilities:

• Define company-wide go-to-market priorities.
• Align BUs to a unified client and industry strategy.
• Represent business interests in escalations.
• Arbitrate cross-BU conflicts tied to pipeline or strategic accounts.
• Support large deals and define delivery engagement models.
• Ensure that organizational structures support commercial goals.

Engineering Director

The Engineering Director manages company-wide capacity alignment and talent distribution.

Key responsibilities:

• Own the company-wide capacity plan.
• Balance staffing across BUs and PUs based on demand.
• Support PUs with short-term and long-term capacity planning.
• For wide practices, resolve conflicts between BUs and support complex allocations, including reallocating resources for strategic initiatives
• Provide input on technical feasibility for bids and staffing plans.
• Collaborate with the Engineering Office on technical matters impacting capacity.
• Define standard salaries

Business Unit (BU) Lead

The BU Lead is responsible for the commercial and delivery success of a specific customer portfolio.

Key responsibilities:

• Own customer success, revenue, and margin expectation of the BU.
• Define business priorities, staffing needs, and project timelines.
• Manage wide practices directly within the BU
• Oversee Delivery Units and ensure customer satisfaction.
• Act as primary decision-maker for what is needed and when.
• Escalate business conflicts to the Consulting Lead.
• Provide interview capacity to cover its own resource demand.

Practice Unit (PU) Lead

(Applies exclusively to narrow practices)

The PU Lead manages a scarcely available or highly specialized capability shared across multiple BUs.

Key responsibilities:

• Own people allocation decisions: who is assigned where and for how long.
• Ensure technical excellence, training, and career development.
• Optimize utilization and capacity across the company.
• Maintain standards, methodologies, and the practice’s knowledge base.
• Run interviews, staffing evaluations, and prioritization across BUs.
• Resolve allocation conflicts between BUs.
• Collaborate with the Engineering Office on technical governance.

Engineering Office Lead

The Engineering Office ensures coherent engineering standards across the entire organization.

Key responsibilities:

• Define engineering principles, methodologies, and quality guidelines.
• Provide technical supervision over wide and narrow practices.
• Ensure consistency of delivery approaches across BUs and PUs.
• Support PUs in designing career paths and skill frameworks.
• Act as the highest-level authority for technical disagreements.
• Support solution design for complex engagements.

Delivery Unit (DU) Lead

A DU Lead oversees operational delivery for a set of projects or customer segments within a BU.

Key responsibilities:

• Ensure on-time, on-budget delivery.
• Manage teams from wide practices and borrowed narrow-practice resources.
• Maintain visibility on risks, staffing, and customer satisfaction.
• Report performance to the BU Lead.
• Integrate PU-assigned resources into delivery workflows (T&M models).
• Coordinate with the PU Lead and Engineering Office for technical supervision.

Practice Members

(Engineers, Scientists, Analysts, Project Managers, Services Managers, etc.)

Individual agilers belonging to a practice, whether wide or narrow.

Key responsibilities:

• Execute delivery work aligned with Engineering Office standards.
• Maintain and develop their technical competencies.
• Contribute to practice knowledge, assets, and methodologies.
• Participate in interviews, assessments, and training activities.
• Collaborate with BU and PU stakeholders on project expectations.

High Level Operational Workflows

Narrow Practices – Responsibility Flow

(For all centrally managed practices)

• The BU defines what is needed and when.
• The PU identifies suitable resources and manages the entire allocation process.
• The PU plans capacity based on BU forecasting and priorities.
• The PU manages interviews, assessments, staffing, and prioritization.
• The PU resolves conflicts between BUs requiring the same skills.
• The Engineering Office intervenes when conflicts involve technical standards.
• The Engineering Director supports global capacity planning.
• The Consulting Lead resolves business-level conflicts.

Wide Practices – Responsibility Flow

(For practices directly managed by BUs)

• The BU defines demand, timing, allocations, and operational management.
• The BU preserve internal capacity for interviews and assigns resources to projects.
• The Engineering Office supervises adherence to technical standards.
• The Engineering Director:
  • intervenes in conflicts between BUs,
  • supports or enforces reallocation,
  • balances demand and availability.
• The Consulting Lead intervenes in commercial escalations and strategic positioning.

Rationale

1. Efficiency in managing scarcely available or specific skills (narrow)
   Avoids underutilization, conflicts, and fragmentation of methodologies.

2. Autonomy and speed for widely available skills (wide)
   Reduces overhead and increases responsiveness of BUs to customer demand.

3. Unified technical governance
   Maintains quality, consistency, and engineering identity across the company.

4. Structural flexibility
   Practices can shift from wide to narrow (or vice versa) based on company growth, market trends, or talent availability.

Delivery Management Framework

Delivery management between BUs and PUs follows two distinct engagement models, depending on whether the BU delegates delivery responsibility to the PU or borrows resources while retaining control.
These models clarify accountability, reporting lines, and operational collaboration.

PU-Delivered Work (Fixed-Budget Services)

In this model, the BU delegates a fully scoped piece of work to the PU under a fixed budget and expected outcomes.

Core principles:

• The PU owns end-to-end delivery responsibility for the delegated scope.
• The BU remains accountable for customer management and revenue and margin expectation but does not participate in day-to-day delivery decisions.
• Delivery execution, staffing, planning, and risk management are performed by the PU.
• The PU must adhere to engineering standards defined by the Engineering Office.

Required reporting from PU to BU:

• Completion status and milestone tracking
• Efficiency metrics and productivity insights
• Delivery risks, incidents, and blockers
• Quality indicators and technical debt
• Opportunities for upsell, optimization, or scope expansion

This model is appropriate for:

• specialized delivery chunks requiring narrow-practice expertise
• self-contained service components
• predictable or well-defined deliverables

BU-Delivered Work (Effort-Based / T&M Services)

In this model, the BU borrows individuals from a PU but retains full delivery responsibility.

Core principles:

• The BU owns delivery management, planning, sprint execution, and customer communication.
• Borrowed PU members are integrated into BU Delivery Units, following BU processes and cadence.
• The BU is responsible for reporting progress, risks, and outcomes to the customer and internal stakeholders.

What the BU must report internally:

• Performance and integration of borrowed individuals
• Delivery progress and blockers involving PU resources
• Resource utilization, deployment, and planned burn

What the PU remains responsible for:

• Technical supervision of its practice members
• Performance reviews and skill development
• Ensuring individuals comply with engineering standards

This model is appropriate for:

• broader delivery initiatives fully owned by the BU
• cross-functional projects
• situations where specialist skills are needed within a BU-managed team
• flexible resourcing scenarios or mixed teams

Summary of Accountability by Delivery Model

This two-model system enables BUs to scale delivery efficiently while ensuring PUs maintain technical rigor and maximize the value of deeply specialized capabilities.

Hiring Technical Interviews

Business and Practice Units must support People for technical interviews:

• Practice Units
  • must plan their own capacity for technical interviews
  • manage hirings for narrow practices
• Business Units
  • must plan their own capacity for technical interviews of wide practices
  • do not directly hire
• Eng Directors
  • manage hirings for wide practices

Evolution of Practices: From Narrow to Wide

A practice classified as narrow today may evolve into a wide practice over time as the company grows, the talent pool expands, or the market demand stabilizes.

Conditions That Lead to a Narrow Practice Becoming Wide

A narrow practice can transition to wide status when several of the following conditions emerge:

• Increased Population
  The number of professionals in the practice grows enough to allow effective distribution across multiple BUs.

• Greater Competency Distribution
  Skills become more standardized, more widely available, or easier to train internally.

• Reduced Specialization Pressure
  The practice’s activities become more repeatable, lowering the need for centralized control and specialized allocation.

• Stable and Predictable Demand
  Workload patterns stabilize across BUs, making capacity planning more straightforward and less conflict-prone.

• Mature Governance and Standards
  Methodologies and best practices mature enough to be easily supervised by the Engineering Office without requiring a full PU structure.

How the Transition Happens

• The PU, BUs, and Engineering Director periodically review practice maturity and utilization data.
• When the practice meets the conditions above, a proposal to reclassify it from narrow to wide is initiated.
• The Engineering Office validates that technical standards can be maintained in a BU-managed model.
• The Consulting Lead evaluates the commercial impact of decentralizing the practice.
• Upon approval, responsibilities shift gradually:
  • capacity and staffing are handed over to the BUs,
  • governance transitions from PU to BU management under Engineering Office supervision,
  • the PU structure is scaled down or repurposed.

This approach ensures that the organization remains flexible, allowing practices to evolve naturally as capabilities grow and the business landscape changes.

References

• Resource Management
• Project Lifecycle Management
• People Management
• Bid Management
• Communication & Knowledge Sharing
• Consulting Metrics
• Organization