Since Axelerant’s founding in mid-2012, we’ve done our best to keep Axelerant has maintained a flat hierarchy since its founding to engage help people relate to each other as peers and 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.
We’re part of a promising trend.
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.
Through those learnings, directors and other stakeholders have set forth a way to provide greater clarity, ownership, and growth opportunities for our people while bringing forward consistently excellent customer experiences.
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 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.
How groups relate to each other
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As part of the updated organizational structure, we are introducing these business operation entities:
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Services–a business unit focused on a specific offering and market segment. Services typically have corresponding sales and marketing support.
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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)
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Our conscious organizational choices keep sustainable operations agility and people care at the forefront of our business.
Conceptually, we group ourselves by intent or goals of serving many industries versus typical department structuring. For example, sales, marketing, and technical folks might be united within a revenue group.
Axelerant’s Core Groups
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Global Delivery
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The Global Delivery group comprises team members who bring a concept or project to reality. They are supported closely by those who research and standardize Axelerant’s best practices, plus project and career managers who help team members stay on track professionally and grow personally.
Workforce Management (WFM)
Workforce Management within the Global Delivery Management group strategically optimizes organizational capacity and team member productivity for their being in the right place at the right time with the necessary capabilities.
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Workforce Management works with recruitment, training, and partners to ensure
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enough
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people and capabilities to deliver what we’ve promised
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.
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Workstream Management (WSM)
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Workstream Management within the Global Delivery Management
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group aligns team members by staffing and support engagement types to provide leadership, optimization, and oversight within
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a project.
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The Global Office of COE, facilitated by Sreenivasan, is the leadership group of Delivery, Technology, and future COEs collaborating to align, manage, and prioritize initiatives of the COE backlog to ensure Axelerant’s desired Customer Experience is empowered through the Global Delivery Management Group.
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The Delivery COE is led by Hetal and provide oversight of the Global Delivery Management Group containing the Workforce and Workstream Management teams.
Workforce Management contains Vendor Partner Managers, Workforce Managers, and Workforce Management Specialists.
Workstream Management supported by the Delivery & CX Operations team provides proactive oversight & support aligned by engagement type–support, projects, etc. Mukul is the support workstream lead. For staffing, Monisha.
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Unless assigned otherwise, current Delivery Services, Design, DevOps, Drupal, Frontend, Quality Assurance, and WordPress team members will make up the Global Delivery Teams group.
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Ankur remains CEO (Chief Executive Officer) plus Michael, CSO (Chief Success Officer), and oversees finance as part of the Executive group.
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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 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 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 Services scope and leadership.
Prateek will lead the Digital Experience Services. Shweta will lead Quality Engineering Services.
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The Technology COE will be co-led by Hussain and Bassam and supported by Shweta. Within the Technology COE are team members focused on functional areas like Training and Knowledge Management, Community & Contributions, and Research & Development.
Other 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 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 Delivery Operations team supports Workstream Management and provides proactive oversight with support by engagement type: support, projects, etc.
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People Care
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The People Care group helps team members maximize benefit usage while reducing administrative friction. Aspects like engagement and recruitment are driven by The People Program group elsewhere.
Revenue
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The Revenue group typically consists of account management, marketing, sales, and support folks who raise awareness and ensure relationships within the communities and industries we sustain.
Services
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The Services group contains multiple business units, each focusing on a specific offering and market segment.
Digital Marketing Group
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The Digital Marketing group exemplifies how Axelerant defies typical business organizations. First, Digital Marketing provides service to internal and external customers regarding awareness, events, and promotions. Further, The People Program challenges HR convention by owning recruitment and engagement as part of the team member experience.
Project (Engagement) Team Structure & Support
Project teams typically consist of an account manager, a project manager, a lead, and can-do team members. Workforce Management assigns people based on skills, capability, and availability to create cross-functional teams.
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Axelerant’s Reporting Managers
Every Axelerant team member has a reporting manager assigned to help them understand organizational/group/engagement intent and desired outcomes, including prioritization. E.g., a lead helping breaks down a task into ordered, manageable parts.The , collaboratively plan and set the work, monitor progress, give feedback, mentor, measure performance, suggest coaching or training of behavioral and functional skills, etc.
For Quality Assurance and Software Engineering team members of the Global Delivery group, the reporting manager will often be the their engagement’s project manager or engagement leader. This person will change over time.
For other team members, their reporting manager will typically be the manager of their assigned group.
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Axelerant’s Career Managers
The second manager, the career manager, assists with how things get done and promotes standards of excellence. E.g., behavioral and functional skills mentoring. Further, the The career manager is also responsible for performance career development review and salary appraisal with the support of the reporting manager and peer feedback.
The For Quality Assurance and Software Engineering team members of the Global Delivery group, their career manager will typically be a relevant technical workforce manager and . They will not change over time as they are invested in mapping you to your meaningful career opportunities.
Operational team member reporting manager
For all other operational roles at Axelerant, team members will generally have one 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.
What does an engagement team look like?
Engagement teams typically consist of an account manager, 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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How do I benefit?
Clearer reporting manager responsibilities
Their career manager will typically be their reporting manager for other group team members.
Reporting and Career Manager Differences
Your reporting manager will guide what you’re working on. Your career manager will support enhancing your career capabilities. And when more assistance is needed, Performance coaches are called upon for relevant behavioral or functional skills training .
More growth opportunities
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 is accountable for setting service level expectations plus ensuring escalations and overcoming risks.
Further, direct lines of communication between Sales and Services will provide quicker insights into customer-driven concerns and opportunities. Plus, help internal awareness, align groups, and improve service expectations.
Glossary
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Term
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Definition
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Account Manager
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The Account Manager owns the Customer’s journey with Axelerant.
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Area Leader
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The leader or manager of a group is accountable for that area with oversight of Team Members.
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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.).
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Coaching
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The Coaching team facilitates engaged relationships, personal growth-driven choices, and safe conversations within Axelerant’s culture.
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Community & Contributions Team
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Responsible for leading and managing community and open source contributions.
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Delivery & CX Operations
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Operational support on delivery oriented tasks to the workstream management group
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Delivery Team Member
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Any individual working as part of an engagement team working to deliver value to clients for the relevant service offerings through different engagement types
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Engagement (People Operations)
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The Engagement team is accountable for welcoming people to Axelerant and ensuring they stay highly engaged and delivering through harmonious operations.
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Global Delivery Teams
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Any team working to deliver value to clients for the relevant service offerings through different engagement types (managed staff aug, managed project, managed support)
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Global Office of COE
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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.
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People Support
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A group of individuals working to support people management through functions such as administration, coaching, engagement, performance management, and recruitment
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Performance Management
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The Performance Management team ensures holistic feedback to keep team members moving forward.
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Research & Development Team
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Responsible for building differentiators that aid Axelerant in doing business. The following is an inexhaustive list of such differentiators.
Evaluate and advocate essential practices in the industry to optimize software development, e.g., CI, automated testing, etc.
Accelerators that speed up feature development.
Platforms and tooling to speed up development activities.
Prototypes and PoCs that aid in marketing or improving community presence.
Applications and frameworks to aid development teams or any other strategic requirement.
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Salesperson
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The Salesperson is associated with an account type or domain.
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Services
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Services have associated rate cards, pre-sales support, and consultancy. This is the entry point for all customers looking to engage with Axelerant.
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Training & Knowledge Management Team
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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.
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Workforce Management
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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.
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Workstream Management
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when more assistance is needed.