Tesco

Table of contents

Tesco Mobile Transforms Organisational Visibility

‍Challenge: Unlocking Organisational Insight and Agility

The Solution: TeamForm as the System of Record for Teams

The Impact: Immediate Value and Enterprise-Wide Adoption

Why TeamForm Was the Right Choice for Tesco Mobile

A Clearer, Smarter Way to Organise for Delivery

Tesco Mobile and TeamForm Case Study

From Project to Capacity Funding Models

Alex Fuller

Tesco Mobile Transforms Organisational Visibility and Workforce Planning with TeamForm

Tesco Mobile—the UK’s largest MVNO—was scaling fast on a modern Chapters, Tribes and Squads model, but its org insight lived in error-prone spreadsheets and siloed HR systems. Without a single view of teams, skills, or spend, leaders struggled to forecast capacity, track value, or steer talent toward strategic goals.

Enter TeamForm. By integrating with Tesco Mobile’s HR and Jira data, TeamForm became the real-time “source of truth” for every Squad and Tribe. Chapter Leads validated team structures, surfaced skill gaps, and finally shared tacit knowledge in one intuitive interface—all in weeks, not months.

The results were immediate:

Data-driven resourcing: leadership now allocates talent with confidence, ditching guesswork.
Full-org visibility: every colleague can explore missions, members, and costs in seconds.
Real-time cost awareness: Squad and Tribe budgets are crystal-clear, empowering smarter investment calls.
Smarter workforce planning: accurate, up-to-date data fuels both near-term moves and long-range capacity models.

With TeamForm, Tesco Mobile transformed scattered spreadsheets into a living map of its organisation—unlocking clarity, agility, and measurable value at every level.

The pace of change is increasing. Organisations that adapt fast are poised to leapfrog the competition. As ways of working evolve, the method by which outcomes and work are funded must also evolve. However, there is no perfect one-size-fits-all solution, so taking an incremental approach to this change, learning and improving as you go, is the way forward.

"As long as you're in the business that you are in, you need to continuously improve, continuously innovate, 'evergreen' your value offering. Standing still is not standing still, it's going backwards. Not treating Value (Products) as long lived, results in the need to slash and burn, replace at a later date, for a higher cost (here we go again)"
‍
- Jon Smart, Sooner Safer Happier

Organisations are expected to do more with less, unable to commit to projects that may take years to prove value. On the other hand, most people can recall a project that continued to be funded long after it had gone over time, budget and scope, otherwise known as the "escalation of commitment."

Organisations with a more modern approach adopt long-lived cross-functional teams as part of teams-of-teams (aka value streams) and orient around the flow of value. When capacity is funded rather than the project, there is far less focus on whether the pot of money has been used in full and more on whether the money that has been spent is yielding the outcomes sought.

If we look at the Tuckman stages of team development: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing, we understand that teams perform better when they stay together. Teams are the unit of delivery and should be stable, not static.

Teams become high performing over time. Project-based funding eventually breaks teams apart and prevents them from reaching their full potential.

This team-focused approach to funding is usually referred to as an investment hypothesis or bet, to signify that the organisation is investing in solving a problem, rather than in developing a specific solution or set of deliverables. Consumers will tell you (directly or indirectly) if what you have delivered is valuable - your metrics will give you the insights you need.

If an organisation can pivot on its investment hypothesis, it should increase business agility, but this is only the case if teams plan work in thin slices (that can be independently delivered over time - a quarter or less), rather than a deliverable that may span multiple quarters and cannot be stopped halfway. If teams plan and deliver work incrementally, they can rapidly find out if it is generating value, and if not, pivot with little waste. At worst, the next quarter will need adjusting.

For further reading check out How should I fund agility by our partners at Sooner Safer Happier.

Challenge: Unlocking Organisational Insight and Agility

As the largest MVNO in the UK with industry-leading customer satisfaction, Tesco Mobile found itself grappling with increasingly complex team structures and planning needs. Their workforce operated in a modern organisational model based on Chapters, Tribes, and Squads, enabling agility and customer-focused delivery. However, they lacked the tooling to support their growth.

Organisational planning was done entirely in spreadsheets. These were plagued by usability and stability issues, the effort of manual upkeep, and siloed data - making it almost impossible to build a clear, scalable picture of the organisation. Chapter Leads held tacit knowledge of their teams' skills, but there was no system for capturing or sharing this information across the enterprise.

An additional complexity for Tesco Mobile was that as a joint venture between two parent organisations, colleagues at Tesco Mobile are directly employed by either one of the parents. This means that data on people were mastered in separate systems not under Tesco Mobile’s control.

Without a single source of truth for team structures, skills, and strategic alignment, Tesco Mobile faced several critical limitations:

Difficulty understanding where talent was deployed and whether it was delivering value.
No way to effectively manage or forecast workforce needs.
A fragmented, unclear picture of how teams aligned to business goals and current work.

With constant margin pressure in a highly competitive industry, organising for efficient delivery of value and strategic alignment are critical to business growth.

The Solution: TeamForm as the System of Record for Teams

Tesco Mobile selected TeamForm for its ability to act as the single source of truth for all teams in the business - particularly cross-functional Squads and Tribes. Unlike traditional HR tools focused only on reporting lines, TeamForm makes teams and team-based delivery visible, explorable, and manageable across the entire organisation.

Key steps in the implementation included:

Integration with existing data: TeamForm was connected to Tesco Mobile’s HR system and Jira to synchronise people data and work (epics) respectively.
Data quality uplift: Integration surfaced inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Tesco Mobile’s underlying enterprise data, enabling systematic improvements.
Team structure upload and validation: As-is Squad and Tribe structures were imported into TeamForm. Leaders were empowered to review and correct team memberships and roles.
Visibility and usability for all: For the first time, Chapter, Tribe, and Squad leads had a shared, real-time view of their people, roles, and work in one intuitive interface.

"TeamForm immediately showed its value with the visibility, transparency and accountability it brought to our business. This has resulted in much richer, fully informed conversations on requests for additional headcount and internal moves where we move talent to value or personal growth opportunities. This has enabled faster and better decisions for teams and for the business."
‍
— Matthew McBride,
Head of Transformation and Business Agility, Tesco Mobile

The Impact: Immediate Value and Enterprise-Wide Adoption

The results of the implementation were immediate and profound:

‍✅ Data-Driven Decision Making
‍Leadership could now make fully informed resourcing decisions, with clear insights into where talent was deployed and what they were working on. This replaced guesswork with evidence-based responses to requests for additional capacity.

‍✅ Full Organisational Visibility
‍Every employee gained access to an up-to-date, explorable view of the organisation—teams, their purpose, membership, and strategic alignment—enabling smoother collaboration and internal navigation.Now all colleagues can easily understand the full organisational structure of all teams, understand what they are working on and how that work aligns to value.

‍✅ Real-Time Cost Awareness
‍Instead of waiting for finance reconciliations, leaders could now see real-time squad and tribe costs, improving budget accountability and investment decisions.

‍✅ Improved Workforce Planning
‍With a consistent, accessible view of current teams and work, Tesco Mobile could now conduct both immediate and long-term workforce planning with confidence.

The below are common sets of investment types used in large, complex financial services organisations.

Why TeamForm Was the Right Choice for Tesco Mobile

Tesco Mobile evaluated multiple tools but ultimately chose TeamForm for several key reasons:

Unique Value Proposition: TeamForm was the only platform purpose-built to be the system of record for cross-functional teams, offering value beyond traditional admin tools.
Enterprise-Wide Usability: TeamForm’s intuitive interface made it easy for everyone—from executives to team leads—to engage with and adopt the platform.
Rapid Time-to-Value: Thanks to its focus on user experience, TeamForm enabled a fast rollout and strong user adoption across the business.
‍

"Working with the TeamForm team has been an absolute pleasure and a transformative experience for our organisation. The introduction of TeamForm as the source of truth for the shape of our business and the work our teams do has revolutionised Tesco Mobile, bringing unprecedented clarity and efficiency to our processes. But what truly sets our journey with TeamForm apart, is their unwavering support and partnership. They have stood by us as strategic partners, guiding us through every step of the journey with their expertise and dedication. Their true commitment to our success has been invaluable, and we are incredibly grateful for their contributions."
— Daniel Barrett,
People Programme Lead, Tesco Mobile

A Clearer, Smarter Way to Organise for Delivery

By implementing TeamForm, Tesco Mobile moved from fragmented spreadsheets to a dynamic, unified view of their organisation—enabling smarter decisions, more strategic workforce planning, and greater agility in delivering value.TeamForm helped Tesco Mobile turn visibility into velocity and value.