What it takes to change a system you didn't build
EV drivers do not experience an operating model. They experience whether the service works when they need it: buying a charger, getting it installed at the right time, charging reliably, and getting support when something goes wrong.
Shell Recharge Solutions had grown rapidly through acquisition, inheriting technology, processes and cultures that had never been designed to work together as one operating model. Over a two-year engagement, Adaptavis helped the leadership team establish an electric vehicle home charging value stream and move from siloed local performance views to clearer visibility of demand, flow, product decisions, portfolio economics, failure demand and end-to-end value creation.
This is the first in a series of SRS case studies from that engagement, focused on the electric vehicle home charging value stream. Further case studies covering on-the-go, depot and fleet charging are in development.
0%
Reduction in product and technology delivery lead times, based on SRS's own delivery data.
€0M
In delay value released through portfolio resequencing, modelled over a five-year value horizon co-created with SRS finance.
€0M
In annual recurring revenue surfaced through better visibility into failed charging sessions using SRS's own data.
NPS+
Improved from between -10 and 0 to between 0 and +10, positive for the first time in the company's history, reported at board level.
0%+
Improvement in net margin profitability through a combination of product and process enhancements.
Double-digit
Improvement in initiative cycle time through product discovery and adoption of a product operating model.
ESAT+
Measurable improvement in employee satisfaction reported at board level alongside the operational gains.
Client context
Shell Recharge Solutions had grown by 300% in under three years through acquisition.
Visible problem
Every department appeared to be performing while customers waited too long, support demand rose, and delivery remained overloaded.
What Adaptavis made visible
Demand, flow, leadership behaviour, product decisions, portfolio economics, failure demand, customer fitness criteria, business health indicators and strategy-to-execution gaps.
What changed
The leadership team could see how the organisation was really turning demand, decisions and work into customer value, then change the operating model around flow, ownership, prioritisation, product management and customer fitness.
Most relevant where
Organisations where local functions appear to be performing, but customer value is delayed, fragmented or hard to see end to end. This is especially relevant where leaders face post-acquisition complexity, slow execution, overloaded portfolios, rising support demand, unclear ownership, weak evidence, local optimisation, or strategy that is hard to connect to day-to-day decisions.
The customer reality
Customer feedback showed the problem in plain language: no contact, no charge point, long waits, missed installation expectations, poor communication and frustration with the whole service.
For customers, these were not separate operational issues. They were a single experience: a service that felt slow, fragmented and hard to trust.
That mattered because the customer journey crossed sales, installation, operations, support, product, technology and supplier relationships. Internally, those boundaries may have made sense, but externally, customers experienced the consequences as delay, repeated contact and unmet expectations.
SRS did not just need more chargers installed, more product delivery or more support capacity. It needed to understand how work, ownership, decisions and demand connected to the way customers experienced value.
What was happening
SRS had grown by 300% in under three years through acquisition. The organisation had inherited technology, processes, structures and cultures that had never been designed to operate as one value-creating system.
Many of those arrangements had probably been practical, or at least understandable, at the time. They helped teams serve customers, absorb growth and keep the business moving, but as SRS scaled, those same arrangements became unintentionally sub-optimal for the organisation it was becoming.
What had once been workable had become structural. Work often lacked a clear home. Decisions had multiple owners or none. Prioritisation was shaped more by seniority, sponsorship and urgency than by evidence. Silos had developed as a rational response to an organisation that had not established clear enough ownership, shared purpose or visibility across the whole customer journey.
The organisation was producing outcomes that fell short of its ambition, even while its component parts appeared to be working.
Why every function could look healthy while the organisation was not
Customer demand, installation work, product delivery, support demand, portfolio initiatives and operational decisions were visible in fragments, but not as one connected system. Leaders could see local activity, local targets and local escalation, but not clearly enough how the whole organisation was turning demand into customer value.
That lack of visibility had consequences. Support demand was rising faster than sales because failures were being created upstream. Teams were overloaded because hidden demand was distorting delivery performance. Portfolio decisions were being made without a clear view of the economic cost of delay. Strategy was visible at the top of the organisation, but harder to connect to the day-to-day decisions teams were making.
SRS was getting the outcomes its operating model made likely: functions optimising locally, ownership fragmented across boundaries, delivery overloaded by hidden demand, support demand rising from upstream failure, and customer value becoming too hard to see end to end.
Adaptavis helped SRS trace those symptoms back to the way demand, flow, ownership, leadership behaviour, product decisions, portfolio economics and customer fitness were shaping performance. The question was no longer which function needed to improve or work harder. It was how SRS could see and change the operating model shaping the customer experience.
SRS needed an operating model that was not just internally manageable, but understandable, resilient and fit for purpose in the eyes of its customers.
In practical terms, that meant organising around what customers needed SRS to be good at: timely installation, reliable charging, fewer avoidable contacts, clearer ownership and faster resolution when something went wrong.
That became the basis for designing the electric vehicle home charging value stream. The At Home Value Stream gave SRS a way to focus on customers charging at home as a distinct customer purpose, not merely as work passing through separate functions. The intent was not to redraw boxes on an organisation chart. It was to create a more operationally coherent business, with a value stream that had sufficient ownership, capability and decision-making authority to manage customer outcomes end to end.
What Adaptavis helped SRS do
After the initial diagnostic, Adaptavis and SRS moved in cycles: observe its effect, then decide the change, rather than committing to a fixed transformation plan up front.
01
Map the end-to-end
value flow
Adaptavis modelled the full path from addressable market through to business outcomes, across marketing, sales, installation, warehousing, operations, finance, product and tech, tracing failure demand, delay and bottlenecks at every stage.
That gave leaders a shared view of where value actually flowed, where work stalled, and where local performance was masking end-to-end problems.
As a Leadership Team, we could now see the state of the business. It took the emotions out and presented fact, rather than pet theories.
Leadership team member
02
Expose hidden economic and operational cost
Adaptavis helped SRS see the economic impact of running an ad hoc, chaotic environment: work sitting in progress longer than it needed to, failure demand created upstream, and portfolio choices that looked reasonable in isolation but carried consequences elsewhere. None of it was being priced, but all of it was showing up in the numbers eventually.
The single biggest cost was also the least visible: delay itself, arising from hundreds of different causes. Once understood it shifted the conversation from cost accounting to flow accounting: grounded in evidence about value and how it decays over time, risk, time sensitivity and customer impact, not seniority, sponsorship or escalation.
03
Establish a product operating model around customer-experienced value
Adaptavis helped SRS establish an electric vehicle home charging value stream, with clear product ownership, a working cadence for deciding what to build next, and the evidence to back those decisions.
That meant testing what SRS was actually promising customers against real discovery rather than assumption, and prioritising by customer purpose and commercial value rather than sponsorship, escalation or urgency.
What Adaptavis made visible
Adaptavis worked with the SRS leadership team to make the organisation visible as an end-to-end value flow, not as a collection of functions, projects and local performance views.
That meant visualising how demand entered the organisation, how work moved through product and delivery teams, how initiatives competed for portfolio capacity, how support demand was being generated, and how customers actually experienced the services SRS was trying to provide.
Adaptavis made six hidden conditions visible:
- how value actually flowed from customer demand to delivery
- how leadership behaviour increased work in progress
- how portfolio sequencing carried hidden economic cost
- how support demand was being created upstream
- how delivery performance was distorted by work arriving from elsewhere
- how customer fitness criteria and business health indicators could make performance actionable
Each mattered because each changed what leaders could see, decide and improve.
What changed
The outcomes fell into two categories: measured results and the leadership and operating shifts that made those results possible.
Measured outcomes
60%
Reduction in product and technology delivery lead times.
Based on SRS's own delivery data.
€70M
In delay value released.
Achieved through portfolio resequencing, modelled over a five-year value horizon co-created with SRS finance.
€32M
In annual recurring revenue surfaced.
Identified through better visibility into failed charging sessions using SRS's own data.
NPS+
Improved from between -10 and 0 to between 0 and +10, positive for the first time in the company's history.
Reported at board level.
5%+
Improvement in net margin profitability through product and process enhancements.
Double-digit
Improvement in initiative cycle time through product discovery and adoption of a product operating model.
ESAT+
Measurable improvement in employee satisfaction reported at board level alongside the operational gains.
Leadership and operating shifts
- Leaders could see the end-to-end value flow rather than a collection of local performance views.
- Portfolio trade-offs became evidence-based rather than driven by seniority or sponsorship.
- Failure demand became visible at source, not just as cost in the function absorbing it.
- The organisation became easier to explain and manage through a value stream aligned to how customers experienced the service.
- Modern product management practices, product operations and product discovery helped teams shape and prioritise work around customer purpose and commercial value.
- Customer fitness criteria, business health indicators and dashboard evidence gave leaders a clearer view of whether SRS was becoming fit for purpose in the eyes of its customers.
- OKRs helped connect strategic intent, product decisions and delivery work.
- Teams were less likely to be held responsible for conditions outside their control.
- The organisation developed a shared language for flow, overload, product value and customer fitness.
- The economic framework, OKR structure, customer fitness dashboard, fit-for-purpose cards and delivery visibility were taught and handed over.
What other leaders can take from this
Many leadership teams are accountable for organisations whose current performance was shaped by decisions made long before they arrived. The practical question is not whether they caused the problem. It is whether they can see the conditions producing the current performance clearly enough to change them.
What the SRS leadership team did consistently was use the evidence when it pointed somewhere inconvenient.
They used it in the diagnostic. They used it in the simulation room. They used it in the portfolio conversation. They used it in the call centre debate. They used it in the OKR review that showed teams could be green on their own metrics while customers still had nothing usable to show for it. And they used it in the Fit-for-Purpose work, where customer fitness criteria and business health indicators made it harder to hide behind internal activity when the customer experience and business performance said something else.
That is what separates organisations that improve from those where activity keeps increasing without improving customer outcomes.
Not the presence of a framework. Not the sophistication of the tooling. But whether leaders are willing to look honestly at the organisation they have inherited, and then act on what they find.
Adaptavis helped us to rethink how we approached our customers and our work. By segmenting the market by customer purpose and really understanding how we were performing for those customers, we changed our focus, our priorities and re-organised to accelerate delivery and become fitter-for-purpose in the eyes of our customers.
SRS Leader
F4P forced us to confront the truth about our performance and gave us the tools to act on it. We are no longer managing in the rearview mirror; we can see what matters to our customers in real time and adjust our strategy accordingly.
SRS Leader
By the time Adaptavis finished, I knew where to go for anything that came to the business. Before they started, everything was a succession of burning platforms, and nothing got done.
SRS CEO
Could this apply to your organisation?
This kind of work is most relevant when local functions appear to be performing, but customer value is delayed, fragmented or hard to see end to end.
It may show up as slow strategy execution, overloaded product and technology teams, rising support demand, unclear product and portfolio trade-offs, weak evidence, governance drag, local optimisation, or teams being blamed for problems the wider organisation is producing.
The useful first step is not a large transformation programme. It is a focused conversation to understand where value appears to be getting stuck, what evidence already exists, and whether a short review would create useful clarity.
If growth, acquisition or complexity has made it harder to see how your organisation turns demand, decisions and delivery into customer value, start with a Business Performance Clarity Call.