What makes one manager more successful than another manager in the same department or at the same level of a firm? Many things most likely, but one likely trait of the more successful managers is that they tend to manage to a specific business outcome. What do I mean by that? Well ask yourself this: How many times have you entered a new situation at work, and you become instantly aware of the person who is phenomenally busy? Sometimes, you identify whole teams that are phenomenally busy and yet…the pace of progress seems slow or otherwise impeded. Why do you think that is?

Any businesses with any scale at all will have many traits in common with firms of the same size, regardless of the industry. One of the more unsettling traits is the establishment of operating “siloes”. A silo is defined loosely as a large container of things. In an agricultural sense, siloes will hold grains and other fodder for animals or as storage before going to market. A silo will keep its content safe, but separate. While on the farm that separation is a good thing, while in business it is almost wholly negative.

As described elsewhere, understanding a team’s baseline capacity will provide a rough indication of its overall capabilities. This measure can be used to set benchmarks, uncover hidden capacity and generally ensure that resources are being well utilized at a given point in time. What baseline capacity does not do however, is help managers predict future needs or manage long term risk. For that you need to understand the capacity of a team and how that capacity changes over time. We call this the team “velocity”.

Understanding that there is a difference between the perceived and actual capacity or productivity of a team is important, as mentioned elsewhere. Equally important is understanding just how to accurately calculate that capacity. Not only does this help set benchmarks, but it also makes it much easier for the manager to adjust or manage risk as the operating environment shifts or variables change. These shifts can have real business impact.

Communicating effectively with clients and stakeholders is the only means to successfully manage expectations. Well managed expectations are the difference between building client and stakeholder relationships based on trust or always struggling to maintain some semblance of believability. In essence, you do what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it. Well managed expectations also create an operating environment that is more predictable and contains less stress for team members.

One of the biggest challenges any manager has to contend with is determining the overall capacity of his or her team. Trying to get more production from your team’s total capacity is like trying to put six gallons of water in a five-gallon bucket. Yet this is exactly what many internal stakeholders ask of their teams. Calculating total capacity is especially challenging when the team is multi-dimensional or widely distributed. Multi-dimensional teams tend to be cross functional or organized by functional silo. In many cases, functional silos are representative of a company’s heritage and not necessarily the most effective structural design. For example, teams may be organized in a way that reflects legacy business units created through acquisition.

For any process in any industry to be useful it needs to have three basic characteristics. First and foremost, the process needs to be scalable. In other words, the process needs to be designed in such a manner as to consider all of the possible ways the business could possibly evolve. What happens in the event of an acquisition or sale for example? What happens if orders triple?

Usually the first 45 to 60 days after taking responsibility for an operational area is focused on discovery. Take your time. Rushing through the discovery process will create more complications later. We’ve already discussed the main activities that you should be focused on during this period. Notably, developing conceptual models that describe the operating environment in its current state and starting to build out use cases. The former will help you understand what you have to work with and where your risk areas lie and the latter will help you understand all the moving parts.

It is often after envisioning the end state that people begin immediately planning, but that is still premature. Most business environments are much more complex than we give them credit for on the surface. Even the best operations managers are unlikely to always develop the right plan the first time. Operations is a team sport. That means that you must not only have the cooperation of your staff and stakeholders in order to be successful, but you must solicit feedback and gain the backing of the same parties before you begin execution. This is best accomplished by writing down your thoughts on the proper approach.

The only way to improve a process or operating environment is to start by envisioning what the end state might look like. Essentially, the operations manager must picture what success might look like. In many cases, a successful operation is one where the operations manager becomes somewhat redundant. While that might seem counterintuitive, when the operations manager becomes redundant that means that he or she can spend a larger percentage of their time on forward looking activities. In other words, they are promotable.

Defining success criteria is not a daunting task on the surface and many operations managers spend too little time doing it. Defining success criteria involves thinking deeply about the output from your specific machine or your business operation as a whole and envisioning what a good outcome is. One of the more challenging aspects of defining success criteria for an operations manager is thinking about a good way to measure success.

A good use case will help you apply context and frame all of the activities of each process or inter-related series of processes. It can also be a good way of uncovering dependencies and events that will trigger a sub-process and can help the operational manager understand which activities are more mission critical.

The best place to start when defining the current state of an existing operation is to build out a conceptual model for the target department or organization. If the specific initiative that you are engaged in does not have an organizational development component, this can still be a useful exercise in that it can help you define requirements for stakeholder management and reduce risk for dependent processes that could be downstream from you.