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.
So where do we start. The first thing to do is create a list of objectives that must be met. This means establishing an inventory of specific objectives. The key here is being specific. It is not good enough to say as a goal that you want to "understand my customers better". That is simply aspirational thinking. Your goals should be the specific end-results that if achieved will result in a better understanding of customers (i.e. visit X customers in Y months). This is critically important because it is creating a list of objectives that can be measured and in this way will help you determine your progress as well as the progress of your team and allow you to come to definitive conclusions (is visiting X customers in Y months enough to hit revenue targets?).
Establishing more specific objectives also requires deeper thought and a recognition that these objectives may need to be somewhat fluid. How do you determine the right number of customers to meet in a month? What does it mean to understand your customers? Generally some work needs to be done just to set up the objectives. Sometimes that work takes the form of a proof of concept and sometimes it takes the form of trial and error.
In the above example, understanding the right number of customers to contact likely requires some lighter advance work, such as a broad based client survey. Armed with the survey results, you will start to gain an understanding of how your firm is perceived. This will help you establish the script for client visits and give you some insight into what percentage of your customers you should visit.
After you have established a list of specific objectives for your operational area, you will need to spend some time thinking about how to achieve those objectives. Most people tend to start planning right at this point. That is indicative of a “ready, shoot, aim” mentality that is pervasive in industry today. In order to hit your target you need to “aim” and aim carefully at that. In order to aim well you need to understand what challenges you must overcome. Where marksmen must evaluate things like wind direction and speed, the velocity of their projectile, the effect of gravity, etc. in order to hit their target the operations manager must diagnose what challenges they need to overcome.
What is important here is that the operation manager be precise when listing challenges. For example, not getting enough sleep is not a problem but a symptom. Being ineffective at managing your time and therefore going to bed too late at night is a problem. Solve the problem and the symptom will go away. A good way to think about this is in how you describe the challenge. For example, if the problem is described using an action verb then what we are describing is not likely the root cause of the problem but likely the proximate cause of the problem.
For example, Johnny was late to a client meeting and this damaged his reputation and irritated the client who was already upset with his firm. When asked by his manager why he was late Johnny responded by saying that he had missed his train. The action verb here is “missed”. The proximate cause of Johnny being late was that he had missed his train. But what was the root cause? Assuming that the trains were running on time, did Johnny not take this meeting seriously? Did he cut it too close in his selection of which train to take? Did Johnny oversleep? As you can see, the root cause could be any number of things. At best Johnny might have poor time management or planning skills. At worst Johnny does not understand his job or the importance of the meeting. Getting to the root cause of the problem is the difference in many cases to overcoming the challenge fully.
It is very important to be complete when listing challenges. Many operations managers spend too little time thinking about challenges and diagnosing them properly. This can result in an incomplete process design or improvement plan. When diagnosing your operating environment you must be ruthlessly honest about the state of affairs. Only then will you be able to overcome.
It is not good enough, for example, to state that one of your challenges to be overcome is that the current processes are not well documented. Although that may be true and should be on your list of challenges, you should be asking yourself why the documentation does not exist. For example, the team may not have the appropriate skills to document a process well. That problem may mean that not only are processes not fully documented but what is documented is likely incomplete or out of date. It means that you likely do not have the right employees on staff to get you to the finish line or that they do not have the proper skills or tools to support your efforts.
By simply stating that documentation does not exist you are implying that this can be overcome by simply creating the documentation. The reality is that you will likely have to hire new staff, train existing staff, purchase software, or bring in outside talent to help you overcome the challenge. By thinking more deeply about the problem you will likely be able to manage your stakeholders’ expectations better because you will build a better plan.
Only after you envision the end state and diagnose your problems fully are you in a position to begin designing an end state or solution path for your operating environment.
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