OMDDMS® gives organisations, practitioners, L&D leaders, and the boards overseeing them a shared, testable structure for operating model change, in place of eight separate disciplines each working to their own definition of success.
OMDDMS® benefits four groups, each with a different reason to want a common structure for operating model change.
Transformation without a shared standard leaves eight disciplines each working to their own definition of success, and a business case that assumes technology will deliver operational benefit on its own. OMDDMS® gives organisations a single structure to design, deliver, and govern operating model change against.
Portfolio, programme, and project management; business analysis; software engineering and testing; service management; risk management; enterprise and domain architecture; systems and software engineering; and governance work from the same seven phases, instead of eight methods that were never designed to interlock.
The Scope phase resolves the operating model questions before a solution is designed, addressing the most common failure mode: treating the model as an afterthought rather than the foundation.
The Govern phase separates governance from management across nine defined areas, so a redesigned operating model has a recognised accountable person/party and a way to decide, not just a board that meets.
The maturity assessment sets a baseline and a target maturity, and estimates the effort and time to close the gap.
Defined conformance criteria let a certified Practitioner or accredited assessor assess whether an organisation meets the Standard, not just whether its people have attended training on it.
OMDDMS® can be mapped against existing standards including ISO 21502, ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148, ISO 31000, ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010, and COBIT, so adopting it does not mean discarding what is already in place.
See the full mapping →Sector knowledge is valuable, but on its own it does not address the five failure modes that recur in operating model programmes. OMDDMS® gives practitioners the structured discipline to go with the sector expertise they already have.
Five failure modes, drawn from decades of practice across financial services, healthcare, nuclear new build, and government, give you a structured way to read any programme you are brought into.
A practitioner who can design decision-making governance in a banking context can apply the same discipline in healthcare or defence. The regulatory levers change; the design discipline does not.
Common terms for scope, decision rights, capability, and transition mean you are not spending the first month of an engagement explaining what you mean by 'operating model'.
Experienced practitioners often solve these problems intuitively, and well, but inconsistently, without a repeatable method or a shared definition of what good looks like. OMDDMS® gives that intuition a name and a sequence.
Foundation and Practitioner certification is awarded by OMDDMS Ltd, delivered only through Accredited Training Organisations, and accredited by The CPD Standards Office.
When a client asks whether you know these failure modes and have a disciplined approach to addressing them, a certified practitioner has a concrete answer rather than a reference to past experience alone.
Funding certification for a team is an investment in a shared way of working, not just a set of individual qualifications. OMDDMS® gives L&D and talent leaders an accredited, structured route to build operating model capability across functions.
Foundation gives people across project management, architecture, business analysis, risk, and HR one shared vocabulary and method for operating model work.
Foundation establishes the knowledge; Practitioner builds the ability to apply the full method. Each level is examined and certified separately.
Each level carries 20 CPD hours, accredited by The CPD Standards Office (Provider 51019).
Successful candidates receive a digital badge and certificate awarded by OMDDMS Ltd, the governing body of the Standard, independent of the training organisation.
Accredited Training Organisations deliver courses privately for organisations: virtually, on-site, or at an off-site venue.
Certification is valid for the life of the major version. Certified Practitioners move to a new major version through a bridging course, not a full retrain.
Boards commission transformation and carry the consequences when it fails. OMDDMS® gives directors and oversight bodies a small number of concrete questions to ask, and a basis for assessing the answers, before the budget is committed rather than after the post-implementation review.
A maturity baseline and defined conformance criteria provide a board evidence to test a business case against before funds are released, not after the post-implementation review.
The Govern phase separates governance from management, so the people overseeing a programme are not the same people delivering it.
Where a critical function is outsourced, the Standard expects the organisation to retain the capability to verify, challenge, and if necessary replace what a supplier has built, rather than transferring accountability without retaining oversight.
Who will design the target operating model, how will decision rights be made clear after transformation, and who maintains the model after go-live?
Vague answers to any of the three are an early warning sign.
A named accountable party and a governance mechanism for the operating model after go-live mean capability decisions do not fall into the gap between a two-year posting and a five to ten-year strategic horizon.
Defined conformance criteria allow a board to test whether a programme has actually changed how the organisation operates, rather than treating green RAG statuses and go-live dates as evidence of successful transformation.
The difference shows most clearly in how an organisation answers a small number of basic questions about its own operating model change.
The five failure modes the Standard addresses are drawn from published operational resilience data and documented technology and change failures in regulated sectors.
Informed by UK operational resilience requirements, including FCA Policy Statement PS21/3 and PRA Supervisory Statement SS1/21 (2021).
Informed by documented banking technology and change failures, including the 2019 independent review of the 2018 TSB IT migration.
Tested against operating model programmes across government, retail, and infrastructure.
Read the seven phases, conformance criteria, and maturity levels in detail, or find an ATO to get certified.