Designed and implemented a new Operating Model for the operations department of a Dutch utilities provider, addressing a fundamental breakdown in how projects were governed, planned, and executed. The department faced a compounding backlog of infrastructure projects — continuously fed by Asset Management — with no reliable mechanism to track their real-time status, nor the planning capability to manage them at an operational, tactical, or strategic level. The result was a loss of control that made prioritisation reactive and execution inefficient.
Our team established full visibility across the entire project portfolio, bringing clarity to a landscape that had previously been opaque. From that foundation, we designed and embedded a new Operating Model built around three interlocking planning horizons — operational, tactical, and strategic — giving the organisation the structure to manage both immediate execution and long-term backlog control in a disciplined, sustainable way. Alongside this, we standardised working methods and introduced automation to accelerate project setup and execution, significantly reducing the manual overhead that had been slowing the organisation down.
The outcome was a department that moved from reactive firefighting to structured, forward-looking control — with the governance, processes, and tools to keep it that way.