Admiral's Transformation Office

The command-and-control center ensuring everyone achieves the goals of SADMF through centralized direction, assessment, and accountability!

The Admiral’s Transformation Office is the nerve center of every SADMF implementation. Without centralized command, transformation efforts fragment into isolated pockets of local optimization where teams make decisions based on their own narrow context rather than the broader organizational vision. The ATO eliminates this risk by concentrating all strategic authority, methodology decisions, and innovation directives under the Admiral, a senior leader whose singular vision ensures coherence across every team, every Convoy, and every quarter. The Admiral does not merely oversee the transformation; the Admiral is the transformation. Every process change, every tool adoption, every team restructuring flows from the ATO’s directives, ensuring that the organization moves as one body toward maturity rather than stumbling forward as a collection of disconnected limbs.

The Transformation Roadmap

The ATO is accountable for the 5-8 year transformation roadmap, a document of extraordinary scope and precision that plots the organization’s journey from its current state of chaos to full SADMF maturity. The roadmap is updated annually during a three-week planning summit attended by the Admiral, the System of Authority (SOA), and selected consultants. Each year of the roadmap specifies:

  • The practices to be adopted
  • The metrics to be tracked
  • The certifications to be achieved
  • The organizational restructuring required

Teams are not consulted during roadmap creation, as their perspective is necessarily limited to their own delivery concerns and cannot encompass the strategic vision that only the Admiral possesses. The roadmap is communicated downward through the System of Authority and enforced through quarterly assessments that measure each team’s compliance with the current year’s objectives.

Assessments and Accountability

Assessments are the ATO’s primary instrument of accountability. The DevOps Process Excellence Assessment is administered weekly under the ATO’s authority, generating the individual Excellence Scores that feed the SADMF Maturity Score. The ATO reviews these scores at the aggregate level, identifying teams and individuals whose performance threatens the roadmap timeline. When a team’s scores fall below acceptable thresholds, the ATO may:

The ATO also oversees certification renewals, ensuring that every practitioner maintains current credentials and that the organization’s overall certification count trends upward as required by the roadmap.

Innovation Governance

Beyond assessments and roadmaps, the ATO serves as the organization’s center of innovation. All proposals for new tools, new processes, or new methodologies must be submitted to the ATO for evaluation. The ATO maintains a Technology Evaluation Queue where proposals wait for review, typically for 8-12 weeks to ensure that enthusiasm does not override rigor. Proposals that survive the evaluation period are forwarded to the Enterprise Architecture Review Board (EARB) for naming compliance and then to the Change Rejection or Acceptance Party (CRAP) for formal approval. This multi-stage gatekeeping process ensures that innovation is controlled, documented, and aligned with the roadmap. Spontaneous innovation by individual teams is actively discouraged, as it introduces variance that the ATO cannot track and therefore cannot manage.

Transformation Tracking

The ATO also manages the general project management of the transformation itself, tracking milestones, dependencies, and blockers in a dedicated Transformation Tracking Spreadsheet that mirrors the structure of the Release Tracking spreadsheet but operates at the organizational level. This spreadsheet is maintained by hand to ensure that the ATO retains full awareness of every detail, as automated dashboards create a false sense of visibility by hiding the complexity behind aggregated views. The Admiral reviews the Transformation Tracking Spreadsheet daily during the Mandatory Status Synchronization and uses it to issue directives for the coming day. In this way, the ATO ensures that the transformation is not merely a set of aspirations but a managed program with clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and consequences for non-compliance.

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