What operations actually does — and why good operations looks a lot like a healthy biological system
Startups and small companies are surprisingly difficult places to find an operations role. There’s a reason for that. Early stage startups and small companies often don’t recognize they’ve reached the point where they have an operations problem. They’re too busy running around, firefighting, and selling stuff out of the back of the car. (No offense.)
The “operations manager” role often gets shoved in on someone else’s plate – regulatory, HR, a senior technician, or the classic example, someone who didn’t duck fast enough when the call for volunteers went out.
The places actually advertising for an operations manager may have a particular qualification in mind. But there isn’t one universally expected qualification for operations management. Depending on the organization, they might need experience in management, project management, supply chain, finance, a particular industry, or simply demonstrated operational competence.
Well, great – so what is an operations manager supposed to do? The exact job description varies enormously. “Operations” is less a single profession than a function: making sure the organization can reliably turn its plans, people and resources into results.
In the long term, the role isn’t about being a permanent firefighter. It’s about understanding what systems need to be in place, so that the work, like water, flows effectively. A good operations manager is designing the channels, removing blockages, controlling pressure, and making sure the water actually gets where it needs to go.
Does that mean we’ll never have a fire? Of course not. But if the systems are working properly, we should have fewer fires, and when something does go wrong, we should have a better idea of what to do about it. And there’s a better chance that the firefighters have the water and the hoses they need, when they need it.
Good operations can also be a strangely invisible job. When things work well, nobody necessarily notices. When they don’t, everyone notices.
There’s often a lot of pushback – “why can’t we keep doing things the same way we used to? Why does it have to be done one way?” Well, blood flows through blood vessels. It just tends to work better that way. And blood vessels are not iron pipes. They constrict, they relax, they help regulate blood flow and blood pressure. Good operations isn’t about making everything happen one way. It’s about deciding where consistency matters and where flexibility matters.
Fundamentally, as operations managers, we are there to understand and improve how the organization works day to day. The company has probably reached the point where the people doing the core work can no longer be expected to also design all the systems that support that work.
Bringing someone in to focus on operations can be an uncomfortable step. Operations managers are there to make sure the organization can do its work as effectively as possible. That’s not following people around with a stopwatch. That’s making sure the right processes, people and resources are in place — and, crucially, that information flows effectively between them. If the right information isn’t reaching the right person at the right time, the system isn’t really working as well as it could.
And once we’ve changed something, we need some way of knowing whether it actually worked. Otherwise, we’re just rearranging the furniture. A system that can’t tell you when it’s failing isn’t a very good system. In physiology, that’s called a feedback loop. Something changes, the system detects the change, and the system responds. Blood pressure rises, receptors detect it, and the body adjusts heart rate and blood vessel tone. Blood glucose rises, insulin is released, and glucose levels are brought back toward their normal range. Organizations, just like organisms, need ways to detect when something is going right or going wrong — and ways to respond.
The big questions we need to answer as operations managers are linked to the big questions the organization needs to answer.
What problems do they WANT to fix?
What problems do they NEED to fix? (The two things may not be identical!)
And of course, the realistic question: What problems can we realistically fix first? (It’s a startup. Time and money may be very limited.)
A healthy system isn’t one where nothing ever goes wrong. It’s one that can regulate itself, adapt to changing demands, recover from stress and continue functioning.
That means operations isn’t really about designing the perfect system and walking away. It’s about creating systems that can show us symptoms when things aren’t quite right, or adapt when circumstances change.
I learned about physiological systems in my first decade of work. Then I learned about business systems in my second decade of work. It turns out there’s more than a few similarities in good business practice, and good physiological practice.
If your organization has reached the point where good people are spending too much time working around the system (if there is one!) rather than working within one, that’s probably an operations problem.