How to score your operating model across 11 areas

On-Off Group

October 2026

Score your operating model by rating 11 areas from 1 to 5, one score per area, each backed by a piece of evidence you could show your boss. Group them across strategy and leadership, ways of working, and customer touchpoints, then fix the lowest score with the highest value attached.

Your boss asks if the customer journey work moved anything, and you do not have a number to answer with.

Here is how to score 11 areas of how your bank works, from strategy down to the onboarding flow, on your own, before anyone pays for anything. About an hour and a spreadsheet, and you have to be willing to write low numbers down.

What you get at the end is a page with 11 scores, the evidence behind each one, and a shortlist of two or three areas worth working on. That is something you can put in front of your boss.

Score the evidence, not what got done

Most people get this wrong early on. Someone scores "customer research" a 4 because there was a research project last year. The project happened. Nobody can say what changed because of it.

Use a 1 to 5 scale and tie each number to evidence, not activity.

1: nobody owns it, no evidence it works
2: someone owns it in name, the work is ad hoc
3: it happens regularly, no numbers attached
4: it happens and is measured, numbers are a bit old
5: owned, measured, current numbers you could show today

The rule that keeps it honest: next to every score, write the one thing you would show if your boss asked why. A dashboard screenshot. A completion rate. A recording of a customer trying the onboarding flow. If the evidence box is empty, score it a 1 or a 2, even if it feels better than that.

Most first passes come out full of 2s and 3s.

Put each of the 11 areas into one of three groups

Eleven areas in one long list turns into mush. Group them so each score sits somewhere.

Core. Strategy, leadership, culture. Is there one agreed priority for the year that people can repeat back? When your head of department decides something, is there evidence behind it?

Organisation. Departments and ways of working. How work moves between teams. How long a change takes from idea to live. Whether the people doing the work can change anything themselves.

Customer. Products and touchpoints. The actual customer journey, the branch and app steps, turnaround times, drop-off points.

Score each group separately and the pattern usually shows up straight away. The common one in banks and insurers is a strong Core and a weak Organisation. Good strategy, agreed priorities, then the work stalls somewhere between the strategy and the customer. The ring with the lowest scores is where things are getting stuck.

Then read the same scores three other ways

The three groups show you where the work stalls. Now read the same 11 scores again for what kind of problem it is.

Insight. What you know about customers and branch staff, first hand and recent. Not an old research report.

Capability. What your own people can do without help. Can a product owner run a test with five customers without buying it in? Can your own team build a rough working version of a feature and put it in front of five customers?

Partners. What you buy in, and whether the knowledge stays after the vendor leaves.

A team scoring low on Insight and high on Partners has a specific problem: everything you know about customers, someone else found out for you, and it arrives too late to act on. A team scoring low on Capability keeps paying for things it could do itself. Both patterns show up a lot in banks and insurers, and both can be fixed with the people you already have.

Do it with three other people, separately

Self-scoring alone gives you your own view. Useful, but partial.

Send the same 11 areas to three or four people who sit at different points in the flow. One from the team that builds. One from operations. One from branch or contact centre staff who deal with the customer directly. Ask them to score on their own, without discussing it.

Ignore the average. Look at how far apart the scores are. When the digital team scores the customer journey a 4 and branch staff score it a 2, the gap is the finding. One of them is reading a dashboard, the other one is standing at the counter with the customer.

Spend the session on the three widest gaps only. Ask what each person saw that made them pick that number. Write both numbers down and keep them. Do not merge them into one polite middle score.

Attach a baseline to your lowest scores

Do not skip this step.

Take the two or three lowest scores that cost you time or lost applications, and write down today's number for each. Turnaround time on the onboarding flow. Completion rate, start to finish. Number of applications that need a branch visit to finish. Whatever it is, the number is today's number, before anything changes.

If the number does not exist, that is your first piece of work. Go and get it.

This is what makes a result provable later. In a series of five-day design sprints with a large insurer, customer-facing journeys that had taken six months or more were designed and tested in two weeks and live in four. That is 26 weeks down to 4. Completion rates on the new journeys rose 80 percent, and customers stopped dropping out at the old points. None of that could be proved without the before numbers.

What to do this week

List your 11 areas under the three groups and score each one 1 to 5, on your own, in one sitting.
Next to each score, write the one piece of evidence you would show your boss. Empty box means a low score.
Send the same list to three people in different parts of the flow and ask them to score separately.
Pick the three widest gaps between your scores and theirs, and talk only about those.
Write down today's number for the two lowest scores, and date it.

Questions people ask

What does a score of 1 to 5 actually mean?
A 1 means nobody owns the area and there is no evidence it works. A 5 means it is owned, measured, and the numbers are current. Most real answers land at 2 or 3, which is fine.

Who should do the scoring?
Do it yourself first, in about an hour, then get three or four people who work in different parts of the flow to score the same 11 areas separately. The gaps between their scores are the useful part.

What if I have no numbers for an area?
Score it low and write "no baseline" next to it. A missing number is a finding, not a blank, and it usually points at the first thing worth measuring.

How long does scoring take?
A first pass takes an hour on your own. Comparing scores with three or four colleagues and agreeing the evidence usually takes a session of about two hours.

On-Off Group trains teams, tests products with real customers, finds where a transformation has stalled and builds what gets it moving, for banks, insurers and enterprises in the Philippines, since 2015. How we help with diagnostics.