Since Axelerant’s founding in mid-2012, we’ve done our best to keep kept a flat hierarchy to engage people as team members rather than bosses and employees. And , for eight years, we’ve been reasonably successful in staying flatly organized around technical domains, business departments, and engagement teams.
Yet, for the past couple of years, as we approached and surpassed 100 - team members–currently over 170–a flat hierarchy leads to cracks in how people relate to each other and Axelerant itself.
For example, how differing technology departments align despite being part of the same engagement. Or, beyond a director and project manager being two distinct leaders team members connect with, we’ve coaches, mentors, skip-levels, executives, etc. As such, we’ve unintentionally created overlaps and discomfort since we’ve not been explicitly clear about the requirements or relevance of those interactions.
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We’re part of a 15-year modern business trend to bring operations agility , and people care to the forefront of management. Many companies wanting more than the usual ran into similar people reporting and supporting challenges at our size.
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Between March 2022 and October 2022, Axelerant will evolve its organizational structure. The advantage of doing so allows greater ownership and specialization, collaboration over siloing, and better reporting and career conversations conversation outcomes.
What changes?
Our restructuring reflects our goal to enhance the customer experience better and empower team members through a cross-functional delivery operating model. This model clarifies relationships and denotes expansion to help team members know how they fit in, plus mutual expectations and support their success.
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Services–a business unit focused on a specific offering and market segment. Services typically have corresponding sales and marketing support.
Centers of Excellence (COE)–a team or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support, or training for a functional area. Our service areas will transition to become a singular or merged COE.
Global Delivery Management Group (GDMG)
Workforce Management (WFM)–a team within the Global Delivery Management Group, Workforce Management strategically optimizes organizational capacity and team member productivity for their being in the right place at the right time with the necessary capabilities. Works with recruitment, training, and partners to ensure we’ve enough of the right people and capabilities to deliver what we’ve promised to do.
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Workstream Management (WSM)–a team within the Global Delivery Management Group. Workstream Management aligns by engagement types–staffing, support, etc.–to provide leadership, optimization, and oversight within an engagement.
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How do I fit in?
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The Delivery COE is led by Hetal and provide provides oversight of the Global Delivery Management Group containing the Workforce and Workstream Management teams.
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The Marketing group led by Nathan contains two programs: The Demand Program, led by Brahmpreet, and The People Program, led by Sharayu. Otherwise, no pending changes.
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The People Management group remains led by Michael, though renamed to People Support, with no planned changing of functional areas or team members. Mridula leads Coaching (was Learning and Development). People Operations is led conducted by Vishakha Pinge and oversees administration (Rajani), engagement (Yashashree), and performance management. Dunia Leal leads recruitment.
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The Sales group is led by Piyush , containing and contains Sales Operations, Account Managers, and Account Executives. Otherwise, no pending changes.
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Services and Centers of Excellence are aligned to drive Axelerant’s strategic initiatives. The Services Reference outlines the Services scope and leadership.
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The Technology COE will be co-led by Hussain and Bassam and supported by Shweta. Within the The Technology COE are team members are focused on functional areas like Training and Knowledge Management, Community & Contributions, and Research & Development.
Other team Team member placement is by recommendations from the Services and Centers of Excellence leaders who help determine what is suitable for Axelerant.
Who are my reporting managers?
Delivery team members reporting to managers
For team members of the Delivery Teams group, we’ve two managers having distinct responsibilities to prevent overlap and team member confusion.
The first manager, the reporting manager, helps team members understand engagement intent and desired outcomes, including prioritization. E.g., a lead helping helps break down a task into ordered, manageable parts.
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The career manager is also responsible for performance review and salary appraisal with the support of the reporting manager and peer feedback. The career manager will typically be a relevant technical workforce manager and not change over time as they are invested in your meaningful career opportunities.
Operational team member reporting to manager
For all other operational roles at Axelerant, team members will have a reporting manager who helps them understand organizational or group intent and desired outcomes, including prioritization. E.g., collaboratively plan and assign the work, monitor progress, give feedback, mentor, measure performance, suggest coaching or training of behavioral and functional skills, etc.
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Engagement teams typically consist of an account manager, a project manager, a lead, and team members. Engagement leads and team members are assigned based on skills, capability, and availability by the Workforce Management team to create cross-functional groups.
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By breaking down functional-based service areas, centers of excellence provide for the emergence of programs to own specific capabilities or domains within. Such as Drupal migration, test-driven development, etc. Therefore, new role openings will become available for your application when relevant. as needs arise.
Unified efforts
The Global Office of COE intends to ensure Customer Experience alignment across all areas. All relevant COE leaders will regularly meet as the Global Office of COE to proactively review Axelerant’s delivery efforts for areas of concern and opportunity. The Global Office of COE Delivery Management Group is accountable for setting service level expectations plus ensuring escalations and toward overcoming risks.
Further, direct Direct lines of communication between Sales and Services will provide quicker prompt insights into customer-driven concerns and opportunities. Plus, help internal awareness, align groups, and improve service expectations.
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Term | Definition | |
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Account Manager | The Account Manager owns the Customer’s journey with Axelerant. | |
Area Leader | The leader or manager of a group is accountable for that area with oversight of Team Members. | |
Center of Excellence | A center of excellence (COE) is a future-focused entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support, or training for a focus area. This group offers expertise in a specific subject area, standardizes best practices for wide-scale adoption, and provides thought leadership & direction in their area of expertise. Example: COEs within Axelerant are Design, Delivery, and Technology (encompassing Drupal, WordPress, Frontend, Javascript, Quality Engineering, etc.). | |
Coaching | The Coaching team facilitates engaged relationships, personal growth-driven choices, and safe conversations within Axelerant’s culture. | |
Community & Contributions Team | Responsible for leading and managing community and open-source contributions. | |
Delivery & CX Operations | Operational support on delivery-oriented tasks to the workstream management group | |
Delivery Team Member | Any individual working as part of an engagement team working to deliver value to clients for the relevant service offerings through different engagement types | |
Engagement (People Operations) | The Engagement team is accountable for welcoming people to Axelerant and , ensuring they stay highly engaged, and delivering through harmonious operations. | |
Global Delivery Teams | Any team working to deliver value to clients for the relevant service offerings through different engagement types (managed staff aug, managed project, managed support) Global Office of COE | |
The Global Office of COE is a group of COE leaders working to align, manage and prioritize initiatives within the COE backlog with a long-term focus for strategic impact. | People Support | A group of individuals working to support people management through functions such as administration, coaching, engagement, performance management, and recruitment |
Performance Management | The Performance Management team ensures holistic feedback to keep team members moving forward. | |
Research & Development Team | Responsible for building differentiators that aid Axelerant in doing business. The following is an inexhaustive list of such differentiators.
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Salesperson | The Salesperson is associated with an account type or domain. | |
Services | Services have associated rate cards, pre-sales support, and consultancy. This is the entry point for all customers looking to engage with Axelerant. | |
Training & Knowledge Management Team | Owns the training initiatives and knowledge development of all Global Delivery Team members. Maintains and delivers a training curriculum. It also includes organizing knowledge-sharing activities such as webinars, show-and-tells, learn-clubs, and similar formats. | |
Workforce Management | A group of individuals consisting of workforce managers, specialists & partner managers working to support workstream management primarily to maintain capacity and utilization. This group aligns on long-term career goals, training needs, and overall fitment to projects for delivery team members. Often defines recruitment requirements. | |
Workstream Management | A group of program leads and tech leads driving overall program strategy and overseeing execution and implementation of projects within a program. Responsible for enabling the project teams to use the accelerators, platforms, and tools that it advocates or builds. These teams would most likely use the interaction mode of collaboration or facilitation. |
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