Grow Your Hive: smarter scaling, no restructuring

What happens to a beehive when the colony outgrows the hive? The hive doesn't get redesigned, the colony adds structure: more comb, new divisions of labour, clearer routes between the brood chamber and the entrance. The bees stay the same. What changes is how they're organised around each other.
Organisations scaling at pace face the same problem. Capability at the individual and team level can be excellent, yet delivery becomes dependent on heroic effort rather than sustainable systems, because the operating model hasn't scaled alongside the headcount.
This session shares lessons learned from supporting a rapidly scaled organisation to strengthen its operating model - without reorganisation, and without a heavyweight Target Operating Model redesign. Instead, the focus is on getting more value from what already exists: clearer governance, stronger middle-management integration, and lightweight shared ways of working.
This session is delivered by three voices from across a single engagement, a Business Analyst, a Delivery Manager, and a Product Manager, including perspectives from across the experience spectrum. Expect practical, hard-won insight from multiple angles on the same problem.

In this session we will:

• Explore why scaling headcount doesn't automatically scale delivery performance, and what tends to break first
  
• Share how focusing on one strategic and one tactical improvement at a time can reduce firefighting and create space for real delivery
  
• Look at how formalising complementary layers of governance can reduce dependency on senior leadership for every decision
  
• Reflect on lessons learned from three different professional lenses (Business Analysis, Delivery Management, and Product Management) including the perspective of someone new to the profession
  
• Discuss how "minimal, usable clarity" beats bureaucratic documentation when building shared ways of working

Who should attend?

• Business Analysts, Delivery Managers, and Product Managers at any stage of their career, from apprentice to principal
  
• Anyone supporting an organisation that has scaled quickly and is now feeling the strain of its operating model
  
• Anyone curious about how multiple professions can collaborate to solve the same organisational problem from different angles

Your Hosts: Claire Ward, Lisa Croft, and Scott Colfer

Claire is Director of Client Delivery at Herd Consulting. Her career spans 25 years in various operational, strategic change, business improvement, project, programme and leadership roles. Claire has skills and experience in business analysis, portfolio, programme and delivery management, PMO development and is passionate about Continuous Improvement (CI) having developed a CI service from scratch and knowing how the ethos, tools, approaches and principles can drive true empowerment of teams and individuals. Claire has over twenty years experience managing people, having led teams from 5 to over 120 people and is passionate about human centred, authentic leadership. She has always had a strong focus on supporting, mentoring and developing people throughout her career.

Lisa is a Junior Business Analyst at Herd Consulting. She made a successful career transition from paediatric nursing into business analysis, bringing with her a wealth of transferable skills and a people-centred approach to change. Lisa has shared her career journey on the BA Brew podcast, where she discusses how her healthcare experience continues to shape her work as a Business Analyst. Her experience includes Social Work England, the University of Cambridge, and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). Lisa is passionate about delivering positive, person-centred change, recognising that people are at the heart of every successful transformation. She is driven by understanding user needs, building meaningful relationships, and helping organisations create solutions that make a genuine difference.

Scott is Director of Product at Herd Consulting. He’s led digital strategy, transformation, and product for over a decade. He helped shaped product management in the service sector, co-writing the product management role for the UK Government and contributing to the Government Service Standard. He used this to introduce outcome-based investment review in a public service setting. Scott founded the Product Leaders Network, the largest network of its kind with over 130 product leaders in the service sector.