Find practices worth adapting

A comparison page for practitioners exploring how operating approaches work across business units.

The examples below use Northstar Group, a fictional multi-unit organization. They show how to compare a practice in context—not a claim that one approach will work everywhere.

Colleagues around a whiteboard covered in sticky notes

Browse practices by the work they support

Each category names a different operating question to explore.

Coordinate handoffs

Make ownership and the next action easier to see when work moves between teams.
  • Name the sending and receiving roles.
  • Record what information must travel with the work.

Reduce avoidable rework

Use an earlier check to surface missing inputs before a task reaches a later stage.
  • Specify the check point.
  • Separate preventable rework from necessary revision.

Share capacity

Make workload constraints visible before teams commit to a shared delivery date.
  • State the time period represented.
  • Show how priorities are resolved when demand exceeds capacity.
Practice examples

Compare the context, not just the headline

Two practices, two different operating conditions

The examples are fictional worked cases. Their trade-offs matter as much as the approaches themselves.

Printed documents and folders on a desk Handoff coordination
A visible handoff note

At Northstar's fictional Service Design unit, work passed between intake and specialist teams with different local terminology. The teams used a short shared handoff note: current request, decision still needed, receiving role, and next review point. The practice made missing context easier to spot, but added a small recording step and depended on keeping the note concise.

  • Could the receiving role identify the next action from the note alone?
  • Which fields are essential, and which would create unnecessary administration?
  • Who updates the note when ownership changes?
A meeting room set for a handful of people Capacity coordination
A short capacity review before commitment

At Northstar's fictional Regional Services unit, several teams shared specialists across concurrent requests. Before accepting a new shared delivery date, role leads reviewed current commitments and the next two weeks of available capacity. This brought conflicts into the open earlier; it also required a common definition of available time and did not remove the need to make priority decisions.

  • Does the receiving team plan work on the same time horizon?
  • How are planned leave, fixed commitments, and urgent work represented?
  • Who resolves a conflict when teams cannot agree on priority?

Read the figures as an example of evidence, not a benchmark

Illustrative only: these fictional values are not live analytics and should not be compared with tenant results.

12 requests
Fictional review sample
2 weeks
Fictional observation period
4 of 12
Requests needing a context follow-up

Use this on-page comparison checklist

A compact reference to use when discussing whether an example transfers to another team.

Context to capture

Record the work type, participating roles, scale, locations involved, and constraints that shaped the practice. State what is not known rather than assuming conditions are shared.

Evidence to distinguish

Separate observed results from explanation or opinion. For every figure, give its unit, denominator or time context, source, and as-of date; note sample size and limitations.

Adaptation questions

Ask what must remain true for the approach to work, what needs local approval, which role owns the change, and how the team will notice an unintended trade-off.

Ownership and corrections

A clear route keeps the exchange useful across business units.

Exchange owner: Employee Experience maintains the curated portfolio and routes contribution or correction questions to the relevant practice owner role.

For a correction: identify the practice title, the specific statement or figure in question, and the source or context that changes its meaning. The practice owner checks the operational detail; Employee Experience updates the page after that check.

Review trigger: revisit an example when its source process changes, its context is no longer representative, or a reader identifies a material gap. In this sample, figures are illustrative: the fictional review describes 12 requests over two weeks, with 4 of 12 needing a context follow-up. No source, as-of date, or measured outcome is asserted for those invented figures, so they are not evidence of performance.