Not long ago, I realized there had been a common theme throughout my professional career. Across all the roles and industries I have worked in: Diapers manufacturing, High Education Career Services, High Tech Customer Service, Channel Go to Market, Advanced Research and Development, and most recently, Industry Verticals Go To Market, once and again, I have built, ran and improved an operation. This blog post series attempts to capture the key things I have learned about the topic.
So, what do I talk about when I talk about Operations? Let's begin with a high-level definition:
"Operations management is the administration of business practices to create the highest level of efficiency possible within an organization. It is concerned with converting materials and labor into goods and services as efficiently as possible to maximize the profit of an organization..."1
I like this definition because it is, at the same time, highly generic and very specific. It provides a very clear end goal: to achieve the highest level of efficiency possible to maximize profits, but it doesn't tell you what you need to do to achieve that goal.
So if the function of a business is to provide products and services that generate value for everyone involved, the role of a successful operation is to ensure those products and services are provided in the most efficient way and at the lower cost.
Business practices are ways of getting work done and organizing people, process, and technology. A successful operator focuses on implementing the most efficient Business Practices for the operation they are involved with. Each function would have its own set of methods and techniques, but there is also a general operational foundation we can all build upon.
Some examples of function-specific business practices are:
- Diapers Manufacturing: day-to-day process and safety protocols, proactive and reactive maintenance programs, material utilization, and scrap management.
- For R&D: contribution to Open Source projects, management of Intellectual Property, management of Advanced Research.
- For Industry Verticals Go To Market: Industry enablement and evangelization, thought leadership creation, the process for design and launch of new offerings, input to the product roadmap.
Some examples of general business practices are:
Regular Quarterly and Monthly Business Reviews, Program and project management, Change Management, Agile Development, Compliance Management, and Budget reviews.
The first step for any good Operations Professionals is understanding what the organization wants to accomplish with its operation. So regardless of the industry, you need to answer the following questions.:
- Which goods and services do you, and your team produces?
- What is the highest level of efficiency possible for the good or service we produce, and what is the necessary level of profitability?
From there, you can move to the function specifics questions:
- Which are the function-specific Business Practices of this field that I need to understand and master?
- What are General Business practices I need to implement? In which order?
- What's the best way to manage those Business Practices?
With those answers in mind, you can begin to execute your plan to "run the operations world."
In my next post, we will explore the first thing you need to do to get ready to effectively run an operation: understand what you and your team produce.
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