Target Operating Model Lead
Are you a career organisational design and operating model consultant — someone whose profession is transformation itself, not something you've delivered alongside a broader role?
Elevation Recruitment Group is working with a fast-growing, private equity-backed technology business to appoint an Operating Model & Organisational Design Specialist on a nine-month fixed term contract.
The Opportunity
This is a high-impact design mandate working directly with the COO of a business in the midst of significant M&A activity. Having completed several acquisitions — with more directly in the pipeline — the business needs someone to make sense of what it has, design what good looks like, and build the roadmap to get there.
Each acquired business is different in size, shape, and maturity. Some have their own operational capabilities; others are small teams operating very differently to the parent. Your job is to cut through the complexity, facilitate the right conversations, and design a coherent Target Operating Model that sets the business up for its next phase of growth.
What You'll Be Doing
- Conducting a thorough current state assessment across all business entities — mapping capabilities, decision-making structures, governance, and process architecture
- Facilitating design workshops with senior stakeholders to develop future state options
- Designing 2–3 TOM structural options with clear trade-offs, recommendations, and an organisational sizing model
- Defining future governance frameworks, accountability structures, and RACI models
- Building a transition roadmap with clear owners, sequencing, and checkpoints
- Acting as a trusted strategic sounding board for the COO throughout
Who This Role Is For
- A career transformation and organisational design professional — your experience will most likely have been built in a management consultancy or boutique OD practice, with multiple client mandates behind you. You design organisations for a living; it isn't one chapter of an operational career
- Genuine TOM and organisational design credentials: structural options, workforce sizing, accountability frameworks, governance design — as the primary mandate, not a workstream within a wider programme
- A consultancy mindset with a doer's work rate — equally comfortable facilitating an executive workshop and building the analysis yourself. There is no team behind you here
- Confident advising at COO and board level, and comfortable in an SME environment close to the detail
- M&A or post-acquisition integration exposure is a strong advantage
- Sector background is unimportant — functional expertise is everything
Who it isn't for: this is not a role for programme managers, Lean/continuous improvement practitioners, IT and technology leaders, or operations directors who have delivered transformation as part of a broader remit. We're being direct about this to save you time.
If your career has been built on designing operating models that actually work — and nine months of consultancy-grade work with a direct line to the COO, without the consultancy travel, sounds like the right next engagement — we'd love to hear from you.