Accelerating Shared Services

Or How to Make Shared Services Suck Less

Greater success can be found when organizations treat shared services as core to the business—a set of capabilities that enable and optimize the company’s ability to innovate while maintaining stability for existing customers. This paper presents a deeper understanding of this problem and takes this conversation to a new level, presenting an improved framework for understanding and guiding, helping scale companies through this problem. Each of the authors of this paper has experienced shared services done well and done poorly, and the purpose of this paper is to outline some of the patterns we have found that lead to successful shared services implementations in our organizations.

What's inside

  • Clear Guidance — This paper provides a deeper understanding and guidance for helping companies scale shared services for success.
  • Expert Authors — This paper is written by experienced leaders across industries who have led large transformations in enterprises across industries.
  • Patterns and Antipatterns — This paper helps readers understand and apply the lessons to their organizations through the use of clear patterns and antipatterns.
  • All Levels — Change Agents can come from anywhere on the org chart. This paper directly provides guidance on how to lead change no matter your role or title.
Publication Date
2021
Pages
41
Topics
Software Delivery & Architecture · Workplace Culture
Formats
epub · pdf
License
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

About the authors

7 authors
Charles BetzCoordinator, Minnesota State Digital Curricula Initiative

Research director, analyst, architect, author. I talk to a lot of people about how digital and IT organizations operate at scale.

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Scott PrughExecutive Vice President & CTO, Biller, ACI Worldwide
Erica MorrisonVice President, Software Engineering at CSG
Scott NaselloDirector, Delivery Engineering, Columbia Sportswear
Adam ZimmanAdvisor, Angel Investor & Board Member

Adam Zimman is a VC Advisor providing guidance on leadership, platform architecture, product marketing, and GTM strategy. He has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technical sales. He has worked in both enterprise and consumer companies such as VMware, EMC, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly. Adam is driven by a passion for inclusive leadership and solving problems with technology. His perspective has been shaped by a degree (AB) from Bowdoin College with a dual-focus in Physics and Visual Art, an ongoing adventure as a husband and father, and a childhood career as a fire juggler.

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Damon EdwardsAttestify · as of 2026

Damon Edwards is Senior Director, Product at PagerDuty. Previously, Damon was a cofounder of Rundeck, the makers of the popular open-source runbook automation platform acquired by PagerDuty in 2020. Prior to Rundeck, Damon was the Managing Partner of DTO Solutions, a DevOps and Operations Improvement Consultancy. Damon has spent the past 23 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT Operations. He is noted for being a leader in porting cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large-scale enterprise organizations. Damon is a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps, SRE, and Operations improvement topics. Damon is active in the international DevOps community, co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast, and a content chair for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit.

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Randy ShoupEngineering Leader, eBay

Randy Shoup is a twenty-five-year veteran of Silicon Valley, and has worked as a senior technology leader and executive at companies ranging from small startups, to mid-sized places, to eBay and Google. Randy is currently VP Engineering at WeWork in San Francisco. He is particularly passionate about the nexus of culture, technology, and organization.

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