Organising for flow using value streams during a major organisational merger

Context snapshot

Organisation: Large investment bank

Domain: Finance and Accounting Technology

Scale: ~450 technologists across many squads

Environment: Regulated, multi-geo, complex legacy estate

Trigger event: Merger of two major departments under joint leadership

Leadership challenge: Integrate teams, redesign the operating model, and improve flow while managing seniority and role tension

Executive tension

Following a reorganisation, two large departments were merged under a single leadership structure.

The immediate challenge was not simply scale. It was how to integrate teams that had evolved separately, nearly doubling the organisation, while creating better flow and business outcomes — rather than merely bolting two structures together.

The situation was inherently delicate.

Senior leaders were under pressure to preserve roles, influence, and continuity, while also making the right structural choices for the organisation as a whole. Attempting to progress change through individual negotiations made this even harder: each discussion naturally focused on protecting individual interests, leaving leaders to assemble compromises that rarely optimised the system.

At the same time, the merger created a rare window of opportunity. Significant change was already underway, and while this generated anxiety, it also created opportunities. The risk was mistaking stability for safety — and responding with minimal change when the moment called for something more fundamental.

Reframing the problem

This was not primarily a people or capability issue.

It was an organisation design and flow leadership challenge.

Organisation design progressed through individual negotiation almost always results in compromise. When design is approached systemically — with people placed into a collective dynamic — behaviour adjusts more naturally in service of the whole.

The merger also provided an opportunity to address limitations in how work was aligned. Teams were being reassigned each quarter dynamically to meet shifting demand, creating constant mobilisation effort and weakening ownership. This created an opportunity to move away from project-based coordination toward persistent alignment around value — in other words, value streams or a product-oriented organisation.

Beyond standard value streams, the merger surfaced deeper structural questions. Some legacy systems had been partially decommissioned but continued to consume disproportionate capacity for the benefits they provided. Fully decommissioning them was necessary, but this could not be achieved as a side activity. It needed to be treated as part of the organisational design to provide the necessary acceleration — at least temporarily.

The real challenge was not just drawing a new organisation chart. It was establishing a coherent operating model within and across value streams, and developing leadership capability to make it work in practice.

How we worked

1. Map the landscape

We used Wardley Mapping to understand how value chains, teams, and capabilities aligned to user needs.

This helped leaders see the organisation in relation to the value it actually delivered. For example, while financial services often align technology to asset classes or desks, mapping revealed that many users were fundamentally asking for the same outcomes — positions, P&L, and reports — only at different scales.

This opened up new options for organising around shared product capabilities rather than duplicating effort.

2. Establish value streams and team topologies

From this landscape, we defined value streams and supporting team topologies (details necessarily confidential).

This raised a number of broadly applicable design patterns, including:

• An enabling team of engineering champions to support DevOps pipelines, practices and engineering quality across teams

• A dedicated decommissioning team to accelerate the retirement of legacy systems, with a planned transition of people into destination teams as capabilities were absorbed

• Consideration of platform groupings to consolidate shared architectural components

These structures allowed flow to improve without overloading the flow teams (value streams).

3. Organise cross-functional and functional leadership

In complex service and technology environments, no single individual can fully grasp both the business outcomes and the technical implications of the work.

The organisation design, therefore, ensured that each value stream and supporting team had a cross-functional leadership — spanning product, engineering, and architecture — responsible for setting direction and making trade-offs close to the teams where the work happens.

At the same time, these leaders also participated in functional leadership groups (chapters), maintaining coherence of skills, standards, and strategy across the organisation. This dual alignment created a strong connection between strategic intent, functional capability, and day-to-day execution.

4. Create a senior leadership team

Although value streams were designed to operate with high autonomy, a senior leadership team was established for the business unit.

This group included:

• Representatives from each value stream

• Representatives from each function

Its role was to set overall direction — including product evolution, organisational shape, and improvement priorities — and to steward quality and sustainability across the system.

5. Cadence the operating model

The organisation came to life through its operating rhythms.

Clear cadences were designed at team, value stream, functional, and leadership levels, with careful attention to avoiding meeting proliferation. With roles clearly distributed and leadership forums established, the system began to self-balance.

A key leadership shift was learning to operate across multiple contexts:

• Value stream context

• Functional context

• Enterprise leadership context

This was particularly challenging for new leaders accustomed to working within a single team, but it proved essential for coherence at scale.

Evidence of movement

The two departments were successfully merged, and leadership consolidated across the new organisation.

Leaders developed a stronger sense of ownership by actively participating in the design of the organisation and its evolution. Teams reported greater clarity of purpose and increased autonomy to establish effective practices.

Flow and quality improved as teams became more accountable for outcomes rather than coordination. For some leaders, this required a significant step-up — shifting from delivery oversight to shaping work initiation, experimentation, people development, and quality.

Not all areas changed at the same pace. Parts of the organisation retained project-based ownership, creating a natural comparison. Progress and healthier behaviours were visible where value streams were adopted, while familiar problems persisted where project structures remained.

Inviting your reflection

How do you make the most of moments of disruption to create flow?

When do you recognise the conditions of a perfect crisis and not let it go to waste to make positive shifts?

How might your organisation move from centrally controlled projects to persistent flows of value? And with it, shift the game from delivery-only to flow, improve quality, align relationships in and across teams, and pursue effective outcomes?

And what changes in your own leadership thinking are required to make that transition real?

Talk about the work